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MusicDecember 2007 New York chronicle On the Lorin Maazel's Tchaikovsky festival, the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, the pianist Ivan Moravec at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the London Symphony Orchestra & Chorus at Lincoln Center, and the St. Petersburg Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall. Lorin Maazel, in his sixth and penultimate year at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, did something nervy: He staged a Tchaikovsky festival. Why is this nervy? Well, don’t you know? Tchaikovsky is supposed to be sentimental dreck for sentimental dopes. Virgil Thomson and misguided others taught us that long ago. And contemporary music directors of major orchestras are supposed to stage festivals of Ligeti, Birtwistle, Glass—you know, the hip. Maazel’s staging of a Tchaikovsky festival was destined to make establishment critics see red. And so they did. And that festival was a success, commercially and artistically. Maazel maintains that Tchaikovsky is a well-known composer but not a well-understood one—and I share that view. Tchaikovsky was a refined, imaginative, and deep individual. He was also a genius. Moreover, though thought of as the ultimate in Romanticism, he was at least as much a Cl ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 December 2007, on page 51 Copyright © 2008 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/new-york-chronicle-21-3716
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