Pianist and comedian Mike Boddé has found an ingenious way to prove that – at least in English spelling – composer Pyotr Ilytch Tchaykovsky was destined to become a melancholic person. He reduces its name to the five musical notes hidden in it: chcha. The h is the German notation for what we call the b. When put together, there is a sad melancholy.
In the new series ‘Masterpiece’, the Groningen concert hall De Oosterpoort on Saturday evening was dedicated to Tchaikovsky and his Fourth Symphony. How do you sell a classic masterpiece to a large audience? With atmosphere and context. The North Netherlands Orchestra played at Lowlands this year. And now the NNO and SPOT (De Oosterpoort and the Stadsschouwburg) have pulled out all the stops. Around half past nine the NNO played the Fourth Symphony, but from seven o’clock all the halls and foyers were already buzzing with Tchaikovsky.
Deaf child
Radio presenter Jet Berkhout and chief conductor Eivind Gullberg Jensen first outline the musical storyline of the Fourth with fourteen musicians in just half an hour. One room further, writer Arthur Japin tells the history of his novel Kolya. Tchaikovsky became so addicted to the deaf child Kolya and the thought of having his own family that he dared to marry as a homosexual. At the time of that disastrous miscalculation he wrote his Fourth Symphony.
Tchaikovsky’s otherness – a death sentence in Russia at the time – is discussed in the downstairs room in an interview with Solange Dekker, declared the most beautiful trans woman in the world. Historian Tea Stamhuis explains elsewhere that women played an important role in the life of the Russian composer, for example the wealthy widow Nadezdja von Meck, who supported him financially and with whom he exchanged about twelve hundred letters.
Furthermore, three orchestra musicians talk about their relationship with Tchaikovsky’s FourthNNO percussionist Stefan Krischbaum will give an interactive workshop and six jazz students from the Prince Claus Conservatoire will improvise on the composer’s themes in one of the foyers.
And then there is Mike Boddé who unparalleledly turns the themes of the symphony inside out. He explains musical terms in a visual way: when you hear the ‘andantino’ of the second part, you can think of “a small and feisty korfball referee striding across the field (no offense)”.
There is a relaxed atmosphere among the nine hundred visitors in which no one has to feel left out. There is no audience here that emphatically shows off its knowledge of the classical canon. And to the extent that that could be the case, they are drowned out in the busiest foyer by Tchaikovsky’s Jazz Mob.
The final piece of the evening will be heard Fourth Symphony, with an orchestra in casual clothes that occasionally races through the score as if it were a chase or a settlement from a thriller. Conductor Gullberg Jensen juxtaposes tenderness and violence with sharp twists and contrasts. Sometimes he allows the recurring fate to transition seamlessly into Russian melancholy. The third part develops into a fascinating ballet for a conductor, the final part is a carnival dance in which dreams and nightmares alternately lead.
The stormy ovation suggests that the immersion in Tchaikovsky has paid off. Here not only the ear but also the heart has opened.