Orchestral Suite No. 2 (Tchaikovsky)
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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильи́ч Чайко́вский ; often "Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky" in English. His names are also transliterated "Piotr" or "Petr"; "Ilitsch", "Il'ich" or "Illyich"; and "Tschaikowski", "Tschaikowsky", "Chajkovskij"...

 composed his Orchestral Suite No. 2 in C major
C major
C major is a musical major scale based on C, with pitches C, D, E, F, G, A, and B. Its key signature has no flats/sharps.Its relative minor is A minor, and its parallel minor is C minor....

, Op. 53
, in 1883. It was premiered on February 16, 1884 at a Russian Musical Society
Russian Musical Society
The Russian Musical Society was an organisation founded in 1859 by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and her protégé, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein, with the intent of raising the standard of music in the country and disseminating musical education.Rubinstein and the Grand Duchess's...

 concert in Moscow, conducted by Max Erdmannsdörfer
Max Erdmannsdörfer
Max Erdmannsdörfer was a German conductor, pianist and composer....

. The piece was well enough received to be repeated a week later. It is dedicated to his brother Anatoly's wife, Praskovya Vladimirovna Tchaikovskaya.

Structure

The suite is written in five movements.
  1. Jeu de sons: Andantino un poco rubato
    This movement is a sonata structure
    Sonata form
    Sonata form is a large-scale musical structure used widely since the middle of the 18th century . While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement...

     with a slow introductino which recurs at the end to round off the piece. The Jeu (Play) here is simply between string phrases whose endings are echoed by the woodwinds. However, when the fast movement begins, the constant changes of texture
    Texture (music)
    In music, texture is the way the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition , thus determining the overall quality of sound of a piece...

    , accompanied by matchingly quick shifts between string and wind tones, are noticeable. The development is a fugue
    Fugue
    In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....

     based on the opening of the first theme. It dovetails with the recapitulation, the first subject passing straight into the more melodic second.
  2. Valse
    Waltz
    The waltz is a ballroom and folk dance in time, performed primarily in closed position.- History :There are several references to a sliding or gliding dance,- a waltz, from the 16th century including the representations of the printer H.S. Beheim...

    : Moderato tempo di valse
    Unlike Tchaikovsky's previous movements, the theme is more animate and wide-ranging and includes changes in pace which would create havoc in a ballet performance. What is most notable, though is not the tune but the orchestration. Tchaikovsky is now introducing in both texture and tone color a more unobtrusive variety into the accompaniment than would be noticed in a ballet where the attention is divided between stage and music.
  3. Scherzo
    Scherzo
    A scherzo is a piece of music, often a movement from a larger piece such as a symphony or a sonata. The scherzo's precise definition has varied over the years, but it often refers to a movement which replaces the minuet as the third movement in a four-movement work, such as a symphony, sonata, or...

     burlesque
    : Vivace, con spirito
    This movement is more ostentatiously brilliant than the Valse and includes a part for a quartet of accordions. The overall impression is of fragments of melody flying around in all directions, their individuality asserted by their being well spaced out in the texture, often by their contrasting orchestral colors. Minute melodic fragments, even sound dots of one-note jabs from woodwinds or pizzicato
    Pizzicato
    Pizzicato is a playing technique that involves plucking the strings of a string instrument. The exact technique varies somewhat depending on the type of stringed instrument....

    s from strings, add their own accents. The bold folksong-like tune in the central section could hardly be a greater contrast.
  4. Rêves d'enfant: Andante molto sostenuto
    At first a reassuring lullaby, this music diverts into some of the most strange, even unnerving that Tchaikovsky would write in depicting the kingdom of sleep, with strange, delicate, fragmented textures with no recognizable harmonic foundation. At the end of this section there is a pause, and the lullaby resumes as it had begun.
  5. Danse baroque: Vivacissimo
    The name may seem strange for this earthy music, but Tchaikovsky is using the term "baroque" in its original meaning of "quaint" or "grotesque." The subtitle "Wild dance in imitation of Dargomyzhsky
    Alexander Dargomyzhsky
    Alexander Sergeyevich Dargomyzhsky was a 19th century Russian composer. He bridged the gap in Russian opera composition between Mikhail Glinka and the later generation of The Five and Tchaikovsky....

    " is more helpful. The model for this music is the earlier Russian composer's Kazachok or "Cossack Dance."

Instrumentation

The music is scored for the following:

Woodwinds
Piccolo
Piccolo
The piccolo is a half-size flute, and a member of the woodwind family of musical instruments. The piccolo has the same fingerings as its larger sibling, the standard transverse flute, but the sound it produces is an octave higher than written...

3 Flute
Flute
The flute is a musical instrument of the woodwind family. Unlike woodwind instruments with reeds, a flute is an aerophone or reedless wind instrument that produces its sound from the flow of air across an opening...

s
2 Oboe
Oboe
The oboe is a double reed musical instrument of the woodwind family. In English, prior to 1770, the instrument was called "hautbois" , "hoboy", or "French hoboy". The spelling "oboe" was adopted into English ca...

s
2 Clarinet
Clarinet
The clarinet is a musical instrument of woodwind type. The name derives from adding the suffix -et to the Italian word clarino , as the first clarinets had a strident tone similar to that of a trumpet. The instrument has an approximately cylindrical bore, and uses a single reed...

s (B-flat and A)
2 Bassoon
Bassoon
The bassoon is a woodwind instrument in the double reed family that typically plays music written in the bass and tenor registers, and occasionally higher. Appearing in its modern form in the 19th century, the bassoon figures prominently in orchestral, concert band and chamber music literature...

s


Brass
Brass
Brass is an alloy of copper and zinc; the proportions of zinc and copper can be varied to create a range of brasses with varying properties.In comparison, bronze is principally an alloy of copper and tin...

4 Horns in F
2 Trumpet
Trumpet
The trumpet is the musical instrument with the highest register in the brass family. Trumpets are among the oldest musical instruments, dating back to at least 1500 BCE. They are played by blowing air through closed lips, producing a "buzzing" sound which starts a standing wave vibration in the air...

s (D and F)
3 Trombone
Trombone
The trombone is a musical instrument in the brass family. Like all brass instruments, sound is produced when the player’s vibrating lips cause the air column inside the instrument to vibrate...

s
Tuba
Tuba
The tuba is the largest and lowest-pitched brass instrument. Sound is produced by vibrating or "buzzing" the lips into a large cupped mouthpiece. It is one of the most recent additions to the modern symphony orchestra, first appearing in the mid-19th century, when it largely replaced the...



Percussion
Timpani
Timpani
Timpani, or kettledrums, are musical instruments in the percussion family. A type of drum, they consist of a skin called a head stretched over a large bowl traditionally made of copper. They are played by striking the head with a specialized drum stick called a timpani stick or timpani mallet...

Triangle
Triangle (instrument)
The triangle is an idiophone type of musical instrument in the percussion family. It is a bar of metal, usually steel but sometimes other metals like beryllium copper, bent into a triangle shape. The instrument is usually held by a loop of some form of thread or wire at the top curve...

Glockenspiel
Glockenspiel
A glockenspiel is a percussion instrument composed of a set of tuned keys arranged in the fashion of the keyboard of a piano. In this way, it is similar to the xylophone; however, the xylophone's bars are made of wood, while the glockenspiel's are metal plates or tubes, and making it a metallophone...

Cymbal
Cymbal
Cymbals are a common percussion instrument. Cymbals consist of thin, normally round plates of various alloys; see cymbal making for a discussion of their manufacture. The greater majority of cymbals are of indefinite pitch, although small disc-shaped cymbals based on ancient designs sound a...

s
Bass drum
Bass drum
Bass drums are percussion instruments that can vary in size and are used in several musical genres. Three major types of bass drums can be distinguished. The type usually seen or heard in orchestral, ensemble or concert band music is the orchestral, or concert bass drum . It is the largest drum of...



Miscellaneous
4 Accordion
Accordion
The accordion is a box-shaped musical instrument of the bellows-driven free-reed aerophone family, sometimes referred to as a squeezebox. A person who plays the accordion is called an accordionist....

s (ad lib)


String
String section
The string section is the largest body of the standard orchestra and consists of bowed string instruments of the violin family.It normally comprises five sections: the first violins, the second violins, the violas, the cellos, and the double basses...

s
Violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....

s
Viola
Viola
The viola is a bowed string instrument. It is the middle voice of the violin family, between the violin and the cello.- Form :The viola is similar in material and construction to the violin. A full-size viola's body is between and longer than the body of a full-size violin , with an average...

s
Cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...

s
Double bass
Double bass
The double bass, also called the string bass, upright bass, standup bass or contrabass, is the largest and lowest-pitched bowed string instrument in the modern symphony orchestra, with strings usually tuned to E1, A1, D2 and G2...

es.
Harp
Harp
The harp is a multi-stringed instrument which has the plane of its strings positioned perpendicularly to the soundboard. Organologically, it is in the general category of chordophones and has its own sub category . All harps have a neck, resonator and strings...


Composition

Tchaikovsky spent the late spring and early summer of 1883 with his brother Anatoly after spending some hectic months before that writing first his opera Mazeppa
Mazeppa (opera)
Mazeppa, properly Mazepa , is an opera in 3 acts by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The libretto was written by Victor Burenin and is based on Pushkin's poem Poltava....

, then a march and the cantata
Cantata
A cantata is a vocal composition with an instrumental accompaniment, typically in several movements, often involving a choir....

 Moscow for the coronation of Alexander III
Alexander III of Russia
Alexander Alexandrovich Romanov , historically remembered as Alexander III or Alexander the Peacemaker reigned as Emperor of Russia from until his death on .-Disposition:...

 as tsar
Tsar
Tsar is a title used to designate certain European Slavic monarchs or supreme rulers. As a system of government in the Tsardom of Russia and Russian Empire, it is known as Tsarist autocracy, or Tsarism...

. Anatoly, now contentedly married and recently a father, had rented a house at Podushkino, near Moscow. Tchaikovsky found the house's location to be attractive and he often roamed the surrounding woods, picking mushrooms. He spent three months at Podushkino, two of them correcting proofs to Mazeppa but also finding time to sketch out his Second Orchestral Suite.

When Tchaikovsky left Podushkino on September 13 to visit his sister Alexandra at her estate at Kamenka in the Ukraiine, his priority was to finish this suite. He spent two and a half months at Kamenka. The first five weeks of that time, six hours a day, were spent finishing the composition of and scoring the suite. He had explained to his patroness Nadezhda von Meck
Nadezhda von Meck
Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck was a Russian businesswoman, who is best known today for her artistic relationship with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. She supported him financially for 13 years, enabling him to devote himself full-time to composition, but she stipulated that they were never to meet. ...

 at the beginning of September that if the work were not completed by the beginning of the winter concert season, he would not be able to find out how the work sounded during his time in Moscow. He was most anxious to do so, he explained, "because I have used some new orchestral combinations which interest me greatly." The fact that he took more than five weeks to complete orchestrating the work, despite his sometimes working six hours a day on it, shows the great care he took over this operation.

Tchaikovsky finished the suite on October 25. Max Erdmannsdörfer
Max Erdmannsdörfer
Max Erdmannsdörfer was a German conductor, pianist and composer....

 conducted the work the following February in Moscow. However, if the composer's eagerness to hear the work were still present, he likely satisfied it during rehearsal. The tensions of supervising the Moscow premiere of Mazeppa, which took place the night before the suite's first performance, had tried him severely, and he left for the West to recover before the suite had been played. Erdmannsdörfer was offended by the composer's inability to wait one extra day before leaving.

Reception

The critics were unanimous in their praise for the Suite. They referred to its verve, its deftness of instrumentation, its ingenuity of structure and its wealth of melodic invention.

Analysis

Texture
Texture (music)
In music, texture is the way the melodic, rhythmic, and harmonic materials are combined in a composition , thus determining the overall quality of sound of a piece...

 rather than form was Tchaikovsky's concern when composing the Second Orchestral Suite, making it very different from its predecessor
Orchestral Suite No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)
Orchestral Suite No. 1 in D minor is an orchestral suite, Op. 43, written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1878 and 1879. It was premiered on December 20, 1879 at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein...

. One interesting point about the opening movement, Jeu de sons (Play of sounds), according to scholars is that the names of Tchaikovsky's brother Anatoly, his wife and daughter are encrypted
Cryptography
Cryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...

 in this movement. The cipher
Cipher
In cryptography, a cipher is an algorithm for performing encryption or decryption — a series of well-defined steps that can be followed as a procedure. An alternative, less common term is encipherment. In non-technical usage, a “cipher” is the same thing as a “code”; however, the concepts...

 system the composer used is similar to one later employed by Maurice Ravel
Maurice Ravel
Joseph-Maurice Ravel was a French composer known especially for his melodies, orchestral and instrumental textures and effects...

 and Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy
Claude-Achille Debussy was a French composer. Along with Maurice Ravel, he was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music, though he himself intensely disliked the term when applied to his compositions...

. In this system, the seven notes of the diatonic scale
Diatonic scale
In music theory, a diatonic scale is a seven note, octave-repeating musical scale comprising five whole steps and two half steps for each octave, in which the two half steps are separated from each other by either two or three whole steps...

 are matched with letters of the alphabet by assigning each letter in order of pitch
Pitch (music)
Pitch is an auditory perceptual property that allows the ordering of sounds on a frequency-related scale.Pitches are compared as "higher" and "lower" in the sense associated with musical melodies,...

, starting with every eighth letter until all letters have been used. The resulting theme is not characteristic of Tchaikovsky, reinforcing the idea that the composer worked more often by calculation than he did by inspiration. Unfortunately, working out of this theme in counterpoint
Counterpoint
In music, counterpoint is the relationship between two or more voices that are independent in contour and rhythm and are harmonically interdependent . It has been most commonly identified in classical music, developing strongly during the Renaissance and in much of the common practice period,...

 which occupies so much of this movement makes it no more appealing for listening than its counterpart in the First Orchestral Suite
Orchestral Suite No. 1 (Tchaikovsky)
Orchestral Suite No. 1 in D minor is an orchestral suite, Op. 43, written by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky in 1878 and 1879. It was premiered on December 20, 1879 at a Russian Musical Society concert in Moscow, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein...

.

The other movements are not only more fascinating to hear but also form a collective landmark in Tchaikovsky's development as a composer. Previously his orchestration, albeit excellent, remained generalized when it came to exploiting individual tone colors. Even in the March of the First Suite, each section exploited a single sound world, not multiple ones. This changed in the Second Orchestral Suite. Tchaikovsky now aimed for a greater degree of particularization. Tone colors became more vivid, contrasts fiercer, backgrounds ideomatically designed as strikingly projected accompaniments. He worked to refine and detail his sound world to the point that whole parameters of his compositional technique demanded reevaluation.

One change, apparent in the Valse, was a pronounced shift in melody
Melody
A melody , also tune, voice, or line, is a linear succession of musical tones which is perceived as a single entity...

. Previously, Tchaikovsky had composed his melodies in 16-bar
Bar (music)
In musical notation, a bar is a segment of time defined by a given number of beats of a given duration. Typically, a piece consists of several bars of the same length, and in modern musical notation the number of beats in each bar is specified at the beginning of the score by the top number of a...

 increments, accompanied by a limited range of harmonic accompaniment. His intent in this Valse of including brisk and varied color changes prompted him to do two things. First, he widened the contrasts in melodic character between different 16-bar periods. Second, he absorbed a variety into the main melodic line that had previously been provided by subordinate fragments; this allowed him to make the melody reinforce the extra diversity in color.

This modification of melody is modest when compared to the transformation of texture in the first section of the Scherzo burlesque. In the First Suite was a functional bass line, explicit harmonic
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...

 support and solid, if stodgy, counterpoint. This was all replaced with a mercurial polyphony
Polyphony
In music, polyphony is a texture consisting of two or more independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords ....

 from which a large variety of textures could be imagined, from a single line and two-part counterpoint to tutti
Tutti
Tutti is an Italian word literally meaning all or together and is used as a musical term, for the whole orchestra as opposed to the soloist...

 chord
Chord (music)
A chord in music is any harmonic set of two–three or more notes that is heard as if sounding simultaneously. These need not actually be played together: arpeggios and broken chords may for many practical and theoretical purposes be understood as chords...

s. Sometimes the harmony would barely be sketched in this textural web, but this web's flexibility, along with different combinations of instruments, guaranteed an endless variety of sounds. Tchaikovsky's achievement in this breakthrough was that he was able to employ it so discriminately.

This discrimination is most apparent in the fourth movement, Rêves d'enfant, which contains both the most conventional and most daring music in the entire suite. The harmonic support for this gently berceuse
Berceuse
A berceuse is "a musical composition usually in 6/8 time that resembles a lullaby". Otherwise it is typically in triple meter. Tonally most berceuses are simple, often merely alternating tonic and dominant harmonies; since the intended effect is to put a baby to sleep, wild chromaticism would be...

 remains orthodox enough in its opening half. Towards the middle of the piece, textures become so fragmented and chromatically
Chromaticism
Chromaticism is a compositional technique interspersing the primary diatonic pitches and chords with other pitches of the chromatic scale. Chromaticism is in contrast or addition to tonality or diatonicism...

 ornamented that their harmonic foundation remains elusive. Only at the end of each phrase does a triad played on the harp bring a brief stability. This passage is totally unprecedented in Tchaikovsky's work and seems to leap ahead to the next century. Even in the enchantment music of The Sleeping Beauty
The Sleeping Beauty Ballet
The Sleeping Beauty is a ballet in a prologue and three acts, first performed in 1890. The music was by Pyotr Tchaikovsky . The score was completed in 1889, and is the second of his three ballets. The original scenario was conceived by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and is based on Charles Perrault's La...

which would follow it, there would not be quite the same disquieting sense of the unknown as Tchaikovsky displays here.

Selected recordings

  • Antal Doráti
    Antal Doráti
    Antal Doráti, KBE was a Hungarian-born conductor and composer who became a naturalized American citizen in 1947.-Biography:...

     conducting the New Philharmonia Orchestra
    Philharmonia Orchestra
    The Philharmonia Orchestra is one of the leading orchestras in Great Britain, based in London. Since 1995, it has been based in the Royal Festival Hall. In Britain it is also the resident orchestra at De Montfort Hall, Leicester and the Corn Exchange, Bedford, as well as The Anvil, Basingstoke...

     (part of the first complete recording of all 4 Suites)
  • Neeme Järvi
    Neeme Järvi
    Neeme Järvi is an Estonian-born conductor.-Early life:Järvi studied music first in Tallinn, and later in Leningrad at the Leningrad Conservatory under Yevgeny Mravinsky, and Nikolai Rabinovich, among others...

     conducting the Detroit Symphony Orchestra
    Detroit Symphony Orchestra
    The Detroit Symphony Orchestra is an American orchestra based in Detroit, Michigan. Its main performance center is Orchestra Hall at the Max M. Fisher Music Center in Detroit's Midtown neighborhood...

  • Stefan Sanderling
    Stefan Sanderling
    Stefan Sanderling is an orchestral conductor. His parents are the conductor Kurt Sanderling and the double-bass player Barbara Sanderling. His half-brother is the conductor Thomas Sanderling. His brother Michael Sanderling is a cellist and conductor.In his youth, Sanderling played the piano and...

     conducting the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
    RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
    The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra is the concert music orchestra of Raidió Teilifís Éireann...


External links

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