Like Alpesh Chauhan’s first Tchaikovsky collection for Chandos, this sequel with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra contains a number of pieces that are rarely encountered in either concert hall or opera house. In fact the only items here that are likely to be at all familiar are the prelude to the first act of the opera The Queen of Spades, and the fantasy Capriccio Italien, though even that seems to be a much less frequent concert item these days than it used to be. (The Dance of the Tumblers that Chauhan includes is not to be confused with the much better-known one from Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, The Snow Maiden, but one of three excerpts here from the incidental music that Tchaikovsky composed for the 1873 premiere of the play by Ostrovsky on which Rimsky’s libretto is based).
The selection begins with early works. The symphonic poem Fatum, composed in 1868 and dedicated to fellow composer Mily Balakirev, is clearly indebted to Borodin, yet its moments of lyricism do seem authentically Tchaikovskyan, while the sequence of three dances from The Oprichnik, the earliest of his operas to survive complete, is a tantalising sample of a rarely performed work. Despite its rarity, though, the determinedly dark fantasy overture Hamlet is a mature work, composed in 1888, the year of the Fifth Symphony, though Chauhan’s best efforts cannot make it seem anything like as engaging as Tchaikovsky’s much better known Shakespeare-inspired overture, Romeo and Juliet. As in everything here, though, the playing from the Scottish orchestra is first rate; if the disc as a whole seems uneven and the interpretations sometimes rather dogged, that’s as much to do with the quality of the music as with the conducting.
