Symphony #6 / Romeo & Juliet [CD, Import]

Time it was that to make Tchaikovsky a whipping boy for the worst excesses of romanticism, an emblem of "hysteria" and bathetic self-indulgence, became critically fashionable. But with this composer, the court of popular opinion has proved more far-sighted than the critics. The power of his finest scores--in the hands of a truly sympathetic interpreter--remains unforgettably gripping, and nowhere more so than in the symphony he premièred just days before his controversial death. Valery Gergiev taps into the theatrical sensibility evidenced by his dynamic Kirov Opera recordings of Mazeppa, Iolanta and Pique Dame to shape a psychological drama of devastating intensity in his account of the nihilistic Pathitique. He fires up the Kirov orchestra to a fevered pitch of inspiration, summoning a great luxuriance of sound and colouristic detail, from brass chorales as rousing as Judgement Day and imaginatively sprung wind solos to the composer's trademark roulades, dispatched with thrilling ensemble. The use of vacuum tube equipment for the recording results in a warm sonic focus, with particularly full-bodied bass, giving the score's blackest moments a vividly frightening presence. Gergiev stresses Tchaikovsky's most provocative shocks (you can hear his own gasps on occasion if you listen closely enough), as in the explosive rupture of the pppppp in the middle of the first movement. But in addition to dramatic savvy, he grasps Tchaikovsky's radical new concept of the symphonic journey, with its reversal of Beethoven's affirmative model through the adagio finale's valedictory plunge back into silence (Mahler would follow a similar pattern in his Ninth). Also included is a bracing, epic, and thoroughly convincing performance of the Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture showing the Kirov band in terrific ensemble. Stereotypes of Tchaikovsky's music as expressing the "Russian soul" notwithstanding, Gergiev's spectacular, impassioned interpretations give us a composer that is universally moving. --Thomas May