Thursday, January 30, 2025
For a non-Italian, Tchaikovsky wrote a lot of operas: 11. Wagner wrote even more: 13, the librettos as well as the music.
Mozart, who died in his 30s (not from poison), is credited with 22, but Italian was the original language of over half of them. As Count Orsini-Rosenberg implores in “Amadeus”: “Not German, I beg Your Majesty. Italian is the proper language for opera. All educated people agree on that.”
As for Russians, Rimsky-Korsakov exceeded Tchaikovsky’s total with 15, but they are rarely performed in the U.S. And only two of Tchaikovsky’s operas are heard here regularly: “Eugene Onegin” of 1879, number five, and “The Queen of Spades” of 1890, number 10.
Though Washington National Opera presented “Eugene Onegin” in 2019, “The Queen of Spades” hasn’t been on the Kennedy Center stage for more than 20 years. Also known as “Pique Dame,” the French name for the playing card, the opera — based, like “Onegin,” on a tale by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin — will be performed at the Met between May 23 and June 7. The conductor at the New York premiere of “The Queen of Spades,” 115 years ago, was none other than Gustav Mahler.
A chance to hear an audience-friendly performance of a Tchaikovsky opera is coming up on Friday, Feb. 7, when Vera Danchenko-Stern’s Russian Chamber Art Society presents an abridged concert version of “Iolanta,” directed by Dashiell Waterbury, at the Embassy of France, 4101 Reservoir Road NW. Based on “King René’s Daughter,” an 1845 play by Danish poet Henrik Hertz, the one-act opera was Tchaikovsky’s last. Raised, flower-like, in a French garden, the title character — to be sung on Feb. 7 by soprano Esther Tonea — has never been told that she is a princess or that she is blind.
Three of the six RCAS vocalists, to be accompanied by pianist Tatiana Storozheva, are alumni of Washington National Opera’s Cafritz Young Artist Program, including mezzo-soprano Magdalena Wór, who will sing the role of Iolanta’s nursemaid Marta and serve as the evening’s “storyteller.” Happy Ending Spoiler: Iolanta, cured, marries Count Vaudémont, to be sung on Feb. 7 by tenor Fanyong Du.
“Iolanta” shared its premiere, in December of 1892, with a ballet you may have heard of, “The Nutcracker.” Of Tchaikovsky’s music, that score’s only competitor as a hatcher of earworms is “The 1812 Overture,” played annually on the Mall by the National Symphony Orchestra (and a few cannons) at “A Capitol Fourth.”
One of Tchaikovsky’s other orchestral works — among his greatest, and least-often performed — is the unnumbered “Manfred Symphony,” composed in 1885. Based on the English poet Lord Byron’s long, Gothic “closet drama” of 1817, it is a piece that Vasily Petrenko, music director of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, is famous for conducting.
On Thursday, Feb. 20; Saturday, Feb. 22; and Sunday, Feb. 23, Petrenko will guest-conduct NSO performances of the “Manfred” in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. Also on the program: Anatoly Lyadov’s “Kikimora” and Camille Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No. 1, with soloist Edgar Moreau.
Tchaikovsky’s chamber music masterpiece, a real stunner, is his String Sextet in D Minor, known as “Souvenir de Florence”; he first sketched one of its themes in that celebrated Italian city. On Friday, April 25, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center violinists Paul Huang and Danbi Um, violists Matthew Lipman and Timothy Ridout and cellists David Finckel and Sihao He will play the sextet as part of Wolf Trap’s Chamber Music at The Barns series in Vienna, Virginia. The six players will also perform “Ricercar a 6” from J. S. Bach’s “Musical Offering,” trios by Haydn and Schubert and the Sextet for Strings from Richard Strauss’s last opera (of 16!) “Capriccio.”
Concluding this roundup of spring Tchaikovsky: New Jersey Symphony Music Director (and Seattle Symphony Music Director Designate) Xian Zhang will visit Strathmore, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s North Bethesda, Maryland, home, to guest-conduct the five-movement suite from “The Sleeping Beauty” and the symphonic poem “Francesca da Rimini,” based on a passage from Dante’s “Inferno.” The program, also featuring Chen Yi’s “Landscape Impression” and Alexander Glazunov’s Violin Concerto, with BSO concertmaster Jonathan Carney as soloist, will be presented on Thursday, May 29.