Album information

Long a concert rarity, this most convoluted of Tchaikovsky symphonies contains the gamut of musical parameters: passion, precision, drama, lyric beauty and an organ apotheosis in the finale that sets one’s pulse racing from the very first note. In this concluding release to his complete recording of Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, Mikhail Pletnev is in his element, with a Romantic poet (Byron), a strife-torn hero (Manfred), not to mention one of the greatest of all composers. Under Pletnev’s baton, the Russian National Orchestra responds with an astounding degree of esprit de corps, vitality, rigor and soul in this psychological portrait of a tortured fate transformed into a triumph of sound and poetry.