The Tchaikovsky

The evening opens with Muti’s enthusiastic reading of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 3, the Polish. Composed just two years before Swan Lake, this is Tchaikovsky when he was still happy — and you can tell, for better and for worse.

The first movement trades in repetitive phrases that offer neither beauty nor direction, recalling Beethoven at his most obstinate. The second movement is light, pleasant enough, but slightly boring. By the third, though, the real Tchaikovsky emerges — the music swells suddenly into those lush, layered strings we know from the Nutcracker Pas de Deux, and you hear the toolkit of a composer finding his voice. The fourth movement is scherzo for scherzo’s sake: beats land off the beat with mischievous intent, and if this were written for ballet dancers, they might have better anticipated what Swan Lake had in store. A trombone solo arrives unannounced and entirely without pretense, somewhat too straightforward.

You hear none of the pondering complexities of the composer’s later works. It seems Tchaikovsky simply doesn’t have that much story to tell yet. At times I felt clueless.

But the CSO was on fire. Muti is enthusiastic and commanding in every measure. The strings move in breathtaking sync. The woodwinds shine. The French horns and flutes deliver wonderful solos. The quality is extraordinary — which only makes you wonder: couldn’t they have just played a ballet suite with all this energy?

The Rota

If the first half left me searching for a thread, the second half is where the godfather of sleep paid a visit. Don’t get me wrong — it was a great concert. But Nino Rota’s Godfather Suite comes with fancy staging to rival a small orchestra pit: accordion, celesta, four saxophones, two mandolins, an upright piano, a concert grand, and — yes — an electric bass wheeled onstage. The violin section hasn’t felt this overloaded since Wagner, though here, mercifully, in a good way.

The trouble with non-John Williams film music on the concert stage is that it’s genuinely too repetitive to sustain the setting. They should have trimmed. But the evening’s finest moment was pure theater: before The Leopard suite began, Muti polled the audience on how many had seen the film.

Not a few hands went up. He was furious.

🤌🏻🤌🏻🤌🏻