Tchaikovsky’s style

Flaring emotion How is it that the supposedly reserved Anglo-saxon temperament responds so readily to the wild emotional extremes of Tchaikovsky’s style? Manfred (above) is reckoned to be a bit much, but the similarly high-octane Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Symphonies are crowd-pullers. Orchestral wizardry Tchaikovsky’s hyper-romantic idiom is crossbraced by a remarkable sharp-focus and vividness of sonority, even in the biggest tutti passages. In quite early works like First Symphony and First Piano Concerto, this quality is already fully developed.

Musical portraits Besides being an opera composer, Tchaikovsky was equally a master of the art of musical story-telling and characterisation without voices or staging. His empathetic portrayal of Francesca da Rimini in his symphonic poem is a vintage example.

Painting in sound Some 20 years before Debussy and Ravel wrote their celebrated nature portraits in music, Tchaikovsky composed his symphonic fantasia The Tempest, with its mesmerising evocation of the sea around Prospero’s island depicted by strings suggesting both spaciousness and depth, flickering woodwind and calmly magisterial horn calls.