© 2024 Ideastream Public Media

1375 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, Ohio 44115
(216) 916-6100 | (877) 399-3307

WKSU is a public media service licensed to Kent State University and operated by Ideastream Public Media.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1 Op 13 ‘Winter Daydreams’

Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 1 Op 13 ‘Winter Daydreams’; The Tempest Op 18—Orchestra of St. Luke’s/Pablo Heras-Casado (Harm Mundi 902220)

It was the Russian winter, its contemplative melancholy and picturesque excitement that inspired the First Symphony of the 26-year-old Tchaikovsky. However, he was also a well-read cosmopolitan, as may be seen in the splendid and rarely recorded Symphonic Fantasia on Shakespeare’s Tempest, composed a few years later, in 1873, and performed with great success at the Paris Universal Exposition in 1878.  Reviewers are nearly universal in their praise of this album.

Record Review, 12/11/16: “You can hear the New York ensemble’s roots as a chamber orchestra, lithe and responsive, the chill of those glittering strings warmed by the wind choir, and Heras Casado’s pacing is spot on for me, never trying to make too much of this wintry symphony. ‘The land of desolation and mists’, the slow movement, is especially successful”

BBC Music Magazine, February 2017: “The First Symphony makes a beguiling start with magical restraint, the wind phase properly articulated and the second theme allowed to billow in a way that suggests a fine-tuned Tchaikovsky interpreter … Heras-Casado makes you wonder at the incredible refinement of Tchaikovsky’s most daring symphonic fantasia before Manfred, from the 13 part strings and eerie modulations of Prospero’s seascape to the beauty of the love music”