Search - Park Avenue Chamber Symphony :: TCHAIKOVSKY Symphony No. 6, Pathetique David Bernard conducting the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony

Tchaikovsky toyed with the public on the meaning of his final symphony, proclaiming an underlying program existed, but refusing to disclose it. His death shortly after its premiere brought a perfect storm of mystery and intrigue, leaving an imaginative public to proclaim this work was his suicide note.

In this new Recursive Classics release, David Bernard brings a fresh look at Tchaikovsky s Pathétique . The circumstantial drama that surrounds the Pathétique can be an incentive for performers to see each and every phrase as an opportunity to express mournful longing a practice that isn t especially helpful to the work, says Bernard. And when considering the work as a whole, the suicide note theory that is used as the basis for this thinking is somewhat questionable. The Pathétique s immense scale and relentless passion demands a life force in the composer that simply could not exist inside a person resigned to take his own life.

Bernard sees the Pathétique as Tchaikovsky recalling his earlier works in a new-found artistic voice. You hear Tchaikovsky reimagining his life s work through a more mature and effective lens, says Bernard. The first movement s narrative shape is unmistakably linked to his Romeo and Juliet Fantasy Overture , requiring a balance between emotional depth and penetrating line in the well-known lyrical second theme, suddenly launching relentlessly driven episodes that bring us to a gut-wrenching largamente and a final retelling of the lyrical theme with an epilogue through which the energy of the movement is released. The second movement reimagines Tchaikovsky s ballet waltzes, requiring a flow that enables a light half note lifted pulse at the ends of each 5/4 measure, gliding the listener from beginning to end. The Third Movement s reconstitution of Tchaikovsky s symphonic finales requires an unceasing energy that drives relentlessly to an ending that is as inevitable as it is exciting. While the first three movements offer a look back, the Finale looks inward to the present, conveying Tchaikovsky s growing awareness of his fate portraying Tchaikovsky s emotional transformation through progressively more expansive pacing. It is here where the entire program of the Pathétique comes into focus gradually, note-by-note, until the work winds down to silence, with us and Tchaikovsky achieving closure in the silence that follows.