HOFFSTACK PLAYLIST #4 - Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, "Symphony No. 4, Fourth Movement"
A Michael Bay Film.
Good morning and WAKE UP!!
Last night I had the good fortune to see the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center’s David Geffen Hall. (The Wu Tsai Theatre at David Geffen Hall if you want to get technical.) It was the first concert of the year for me, and one that’s been coming a long time — I finally saw the Fourth!
The first half of the evening included the quite famous violinist Joshua Bell tearing through Dvořák’s Violin Concerto, treating his bow like a timber saw. Sure, a soloist usually has a stray flying around by the end of a piece, but he had to’ve had over a dozen streamers flopping around last night. This was headbanger’s ball-level of rhythmically whiplashed hair!
Here’s a photo I took of Bell and the guest conductor, the very expressive Daniele Rustioni, after they made it through the storm.
After an intermezzo came the Tchaikovsky, which, no question, has been one of my all-time faves for years.
In college there was one afternoon when I declared “I am going to bulk up my Western classical collection” and I marched over to the Tower Records on West 4th Street. Upstairs was the classical and jazz CDs (downstairs for cassettes!) and cheapskates like me could skip the Deutsche Grammophon and Decca selections and go straight to the somewhat notorious (though now more respected) bargain bin label Naxos. At the time (the 1990s) Naxos was enough of its own brand that they got their own little section.
But! For real misers, there was a step beyond. Out of the Netherlands came Onyx Classix, a true cheapo’s delight, and good for someone poking around at the canon, figuring out what they liked. All tossed in a bin for three bucks a pop, probably with a price break if you got more than X amount.
Is that where I first heard Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony? No. They never put that one out. But in that stash I got a recording of his Violin Concerto and Serenade For Strings, and since you can find anything on the internet if you look hard enough, I was able to track down this cover.
Ain’t she a beaut? According to Discogs.com, a website I trust, conductor Pierre Narrato and the Festival Orchestra Belgium do not exist. They were the invention of a fraudster producer named Alfred Scholz, whose other pseudonyms include Alberto Lizzio. (Lizzio has a Wikipedia entry.) There’s a surprising amount of scholarship about Scholz, despite his work mostly being dismissed as bunk.
Be that as it may!!!! The CD you see above was, for a little while anyway, on constant rotation for me in my undergraduate days. While the other kids were listening to Superchunk and the Jesus Lizard, I was losing my mind to this phoney-baloney, budget recording. (Part of my adoration came once I clocked that Bill Conti ripped off the Concerto for his score to The Right Stuff. Significantly.)
Anyway, I decided that Tchaikovsky was my favorite composer. Not that I knew much of his work. When I bought all that Onyx Classix had to offer of him (not too much, but it did include the Pathétique) I was at a crossroads: find a new composer to love, or break my rule and buy a classical work on an expensive label?
You see, back then I was super proud of getting CDs for low sums. I would haunt the used sections of music shops and proudly never remove the sticker that said 88¢ on the front. (Yes, at Sounds on St. Mark’s Place, you actually could find good shit for that amount. I’m not kidding.) But one day, something happened.
I was driving a car, which was and is, even more so now, a very rare event for me. I had the classical station on and I heard some dizzying scales that were instantly recognizable. It was a little sting I knew from somewhere. From a movie? What movie? What is this speedy “va-va-vava-vava-va-va-va-VA-va” and why do I know it so well?
Eventually it hit me.
On the Pink Floyd album Wish You Were Here’s second side, as we transition from “Have a Cigar” to the title track, there’s some connective audio—the sound of someone turning a radio dial. Between the mumbly British chatter there is, for one-and-a-half seconds, the spill of an orchestra. It’s a brief aural glimpse of the fourth movement of the Fourth.
I don’t remember where I was driving (alone!) but I do remember freaking out and thinking “oh my God, the announcer better come on and say what this is!” You gotta remember this was before Shazam or before you could go to a radio station’s website and see what they played that day. Sure, you could call them on the phone and ask, but that was a hassle. Don’t think there weren’t times that I didn’t do that, though. There were many times I did that, which, of course, meant long distance calls from Central Jersey to New York, which would be spotted on the phone bill. This was a different world.
Anyway, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, I now knew, was the best thing in the world. (Only partially because I could brag to others that I knew what the little clip from Wish You Were Here really was!) I bought a CD of it on the Chandos label because the cover had a boat on it. It was performed by the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra led by the Latvian conductor Mariss Jansons. I played the shit out of this.
In a letter to his patron Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met, Tchaikovsky wrote that the first movement of the symphony “is very long and complicated: at the same time I consider it the best movement. The three remaining movements are very simple.”
Tchaikovsky had a rough life (check out Richard Chamberlain in The Music Lovers for more) so he can be forgiven for getting it wrong once or twice. Sure, maybe the second, third and fourth movements are easier to play or orchestrate, but do not wave them away as “simple.” Especially the absolutely bananas last movement.
It’s maybe the most jubilant and explosive and invigorating music you’ll ever hear. But it isn’t just a bombastic march. It kicks ass at times, but then slows down, then digs in its heels and revs up again. Look at the video up top, and see the amount of cardio conductor Gustavo Dudamel is getting! Check out those tubas! Listen to those cymbal crashes! There’s an avalanche of strings that keeps repeating and repeating and somehow, magically, gets more exciting with every tumble.
The whole of the Fourth Symphony is marvelous—the third part, mostly plucked out by the strings—is probably the most famous, but the big finish appeals to side of me that likes to listen to Iron Maiden. Give it a whirl and start your day right.