Tchaikovsky & Shakespeare (Deutsche Grammophon)
Rating: 5/5Verdict:"Young musicians put fresh muscle tone into familiar romantic repertoire."
With the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra's Romeo and Juliet triple-bill coming up on Friday, why not whet the appetite with the Tchaikovsky Overture and two of his other Shakespeare-inspired works on the latest CD from Gustavo Dudamel and his Simon Bolivar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela.
These musicians have already proved that youth can inject new muscle tone into saggingly familiar repertoire; the sheer chutzpah of their recent Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony made tired rhetoric ring anew.
The SBSOV's Tchaikovsky & Shakespeare collection focuses on three works - Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. Significantly, perhaps acknowledging his symphonic insecurities, Tchaikovsky describes the first two as Fantasy Overtures and the third as a Symphonic Fantasy.
The greatest achievement of Tchaikovsky's fantastical ambitions in Hamlet is transporting the court of Elsinore to Moscow. Early on, there's a spectacularly Russian trifecta of tam-tam, trombones and tremolo strings and Dudamel's musicians hold nothing back.
An Andante scored for woodwind alone, dispatched with impeccable ensemble, is a melody with the soul of Russia rather than that of Denmark in its bars.
Simon Callow's immensely readable booklet essay benefits from the actor's theatrical background. This is Shakespeare, he tells us, very much as seen through the sensibilities of the 19th century.
When Tchaikovsky tackles The Tempest, forget issues of revenge and colonial domination, this is a love story, pure and simple - simple, that is, apart from its ingenious orchestration.
This was the piece that introduced Nadezhda von Meck to Tchaikovsky's music and prompted her to become his patron. In her own words, she was delirious for days and could not get over it.
We hardened souls of 2011 are less susceptible to the visceral power of music, but Dudamel's Tempest could produce a goosebump or three. Just try to resist its opening pages in which romantic horns soar over massive banks of divided strings, pulsating with subtle rhythm play.
Predictably, Romeo and Juliet proves the magnificent finale to this Tchaikovsky triptych, with thundering timpani and a love theme that might well have reduced Mme von Meck to a state of permanent delirium.
