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Phillip T Young Recital Hall
May 31, 2006
"This is the best thing Tchaikovsky has written. It is a work you should be proud to publish."
The remarkable thing about the above words, uttered to publisher Pyotr Yurgensen, is their source: for the man who uttered them had long been the bane of Tchaikovsky's existence - "this Olympian God has never shown anything but utter contempt for everything I have written, and it has wounded me grievously."
And yet, it would seem, even the curmudgeonly Anton Rubinstein was won over by a work which Tchaikovsky composed in just six weeks, a work which began as either a symphony or a string quartet (he could not decide) before its composed finally "compromised" (as biography Anthony Holden puts it) on its final form as the Serenade for Strings, Op.48.
The Serenade was an immediate success and has maintained its firm position in the repertoire ever since.
Indeed, I have heard so many performances of the serenade in Victoria in recent years that I confess I was not that excited about hearing yet another.
I should, of course, have known better. Great music - and the serenade is undoubtedly great music - no matter how (over-)familiar and no matter how resistant to mediocre performance can always benefit from a first-class performance by first-class musicians.
Which (how could I ever have doubted?) is exactly what Yariv Aloni and the Galiano Ensemble turned in at their season finale on Wednesday night.
And, however much one may enjoy the "average" performance of the serenade, Wednesday's was something rather special. String tone throughout was sonorous, even sumptuous; Aloni has a very natural sense of rubato and his players followed him to the letter; moreover, he also has a firm grasp of the work's structure and conveys that to the audience.
Some small, often unnoticed details stand out - the sinuous viola counterpoint in the waltz, for example - but it is the overall impression that sticks in the mind. (That and the superbly-managed accelerando into the main tempo of the finale, which was still whizzing around my head long after I got home).
And that impression was of a performance to treasure.
The evening's first half comprised three other works for strings by Tchaikovsky, although only one - the Elegy from Hamlet - was being heard in its original conception.
The Elegy was composed in 1884 and reused for the incidental music to the play; it opened the evening with a fine display of half-tones and shades from the ensemble. But perhaps someone else in attendance can tell me: am I losing my mind, or were there really two successive tremolando chords which sounded as if they'd been misplaced from Schubert's "Unfinished"?
The Andante, Op.30 is taken from Tchaikovsky's String Quartet No.3; the arrangement - by Glazunov - is marvellously effective and the performance made the most of it, from the pregnant opening, via a typically Tchaikovskian viola crescendo over a pulsating cello and bass pedal, to the luminous close.
It was not until the second movement (of six) from Wolfgang Hofmann's orchestration of the Seasons that we heard any really quick music. However the brisk and exuberant Shrovetide Festival (February's movement) swept away any melancholia which might have set in during the earlier music.
The half dozen vignettes include two in waltz-time (one gently lilting, the other somewhat bouncier) and a ratehr wistful Snowdrops (April) whose opening put me irrestibly in mind of the Habanera from Carmen. (My problem, I suspect.)
The last month portrayed - September - brought a driving finale with a triumphant close. It was, naturally, superbly played.
Tchaikovsky's music has never been unpopular, although it has been unfashionable in certain quarters. Nonetheless, I imagine that everybody in Wednesday's audience was both charmed and surprised by something unfamiliar to them on the programme. I know I was.
And perhaps it will help the composer's spirit to realise that not everybody's first thought when hearing his name is of that other piece he worked on at the same time as the serenade, which he completed in a week and which, like the serenade, has been resoundingly popular since its first performance.
The 1812 Overture.
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