Симфония №4

Discogs' ostensibly 'random' button has brought up another of my records on the Soviet Melodiya label only four days after the last one: an early '70s recording of Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony, performed by the State Academic Symphony Orchestra of the USSR, with Gennady Rozhdestvensky conducting. Apart from the composer's name - prominently transliterated on the front cover, and the four movments' tempo indications given in the customary Italian on the back, all the remaining text on the sleeve is Cyrillic.

Of the many nineteenth-century symphonies I've heard, there are only a handful I keep returning to, among them Beethoven's 7th; Schubert's unfinished 8th; & this one. Why the 4th, which often seems relegated to the bronze medal position in rankings of Pyotr Ilyich's symphonies, and not the 5th or 6th? I don't know: the brash, attention-demanding fanfare at the outset must have something to do with it, conjuring up as it does a sense of urgency and of crisis. According to the composer, the music is concerned with unhappy fate, and the "alternation of hard reality with swiftly passing dreams and visions of happiness". It certainly gives every impression of covering a great expanse of emotional ground.

I'm not qualified to judge the quality of the performance - beyond that I find it a convincing & satisfying one. The Soviet brass sound has a rougher edge to it than one tends to hear in Western orchestras, which to my ears works well here. This LP goes back to my first, more tentative phase of vinyl collecting in the '00s, and would have been picked up for a pittance from one of the junk-shops in Karlskrona, on the Baltic coast of southeastern Sweden where I then lived.

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