Brahms, Tchaikovsky, 2024
This Week in Classical Music: Could 6, 2024. Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and extra. Tomorrow is the birthday of two nice composers, Johannes Brahms and Pyotr (Peter) Tchaikovsky. Brahms 
was born on Could 7th of 1833 in Heide, a small city in northern Germany (then, the duchy of Schleswig-Holstein); Tchaikovsky – seven years later, in a small city of Votkinsk, not removed from the Ural Mountains. Tchaikovsky is taken into account (at the least, by the Russians) the best Russian composer, whereas Brahms is among the “Three Bs” (with Bach and Beethoven). They lived by the identical interval (Brahms died in 1897, 4 years after Tchaikovsky), each have been nice symphonists, they wrote violin concertos which might be thought of among the many greatest ever written, and their piano concertos are additionally vastly
standard. Nonetheless, their music is as completely different as it may be, and so have been their lives: Brahms’s was regular, not very eventful (at the least the way in which it manifested itself to outsiders), Tchaikovsky’s – stuffed with tragedies, a lot of which associated to his closeted homosexuality. Given the format of our entries, we are able to do justice neither to their biographies, nor their music: we have devoted 4 entries to Arnold Schoenberg simply to enter some element, and right here we now have two very prolific composers. So as a substitute, we’ll play their violin concertos, those we talked about above, each that includes feminine soloists. Right here’s Rachel Barton Pine enjoying Brahms (Chicago Symphony Orchestra is performed by Carlos Kalmar); and right here is the Tchaikovsky; Julia Fischer is the soloist, Yakov Kreizberg leads the Russian Nationwide Orchestra).
4 composers have been born on Could 12th: Giovanni Battista Viotti, the well-known Italian violinist and composer, in 1755; the Frenchman Jules Massenet, identified for his operas Manon and Werther, in 1842; one other, musically extra adventuresome Frenchman, Gabriel Faure, three years later; and Anatoly Lyadov, the Russian composer referred to as a lot for his friendship with Tchaikovsky as for his small scale piano and orchestral items. Right here’s Lyadov’s Kikimora (a nasty home spirit in Russian mythology); the Russian Nationwide Orchestra is performed by Mikhail Pletnev.