Tchaikovsky joins the gang

Since Christmas is done we’re going to return to our Beethoven Five playlist. We’re using Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 as a loose reference point for a curated playlist. It’s something like six degrees of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Another fifth symphony is an obvious step to take. We’ve already done Mahler’s Fifth with his duh-duh-duh-daah homage to Beethoven in the opening movement. We’ve got Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky (lots of Russians here), Bruckner, Dvorak, Mozart, and Haydn to choose from. Mozart and Haydn aren’t likely candidates because their fifth symphonies are about three minutes long.

I’m taking the easy way out here and going Tchaikovsky. Of those composers, his fifth is clearly the most popular even though serious musicians are going to preach about the Prokofiev. I’m not a serious musician, so I’m taking the populist fifth.

As if Tchaikovsky’s Fifth is a popular piece of music. Alas, none of this is popular music.

The video I’m going with is an exception because there’s no video and ideally this list is composed of HD videos. Of the Tchaikovsky Fifths out there on YouTube I’d say Leonard Bernstein with Boston or Herbert von Karajan with Vienna are the top video contenders. When either of those two conducted it was an event.

The choice I’ve made for the playlist is von Karajan from 1971 on EMI with the Berlin Philharmonic. In many ways, von Karajan was the Deutsche Grammophon label, but I feel as though his recordings on EMI are superior to most of what he did for DG.

That’s saying a lot, but these EMI sessions from the 1970s capture von Karajan and the Berliners at their very best and their very best has yet to be surpassed. Sorry to all you haters but it’s true.

Don’t believe me? Listen to this Tchaikovsky Fifth and pretend you don’t know it’s von Karajan. Pretend it’s your maternal grandfather conducting or Sir Anthony Hopkins, maybe Burl Ives. Just think of someone you have a warm and cozy feeling about. I guess I just revealed my top three cozy old men.

I dare you to find a performance of any piece of music that surpasses this recording for sonic beauty, balance, pacing, phrasing, musicality, and emotion. This recording checks off all those boxes at the very top of the scale. I also enjoy the somewhat wet accoustic that EMI used for this session.

Yes, I understand that this is a studio recording and that it is therefore false in many ways, but there is no such thing as a pure recording or video — even of live performances. They all lie. So, of the lying S.O.B.’s, von Karajan is the best.

The second movement, which starts at about 15:50 in the video, is Tchaikovsky expressing his most beautiful desperation. At the climactic moment he uses the same device as in his Romeo and Juliet to leave us feeling unreconciled, but it works, it works.

Years ago, when people used to invite each other over to their homes to listen to classical music — before we were required to binge watch Breaking Bad, Orange is the New Black, and Mama’s Family — I listened to this recording with a few friends.

It had been reissued at the time and none of us were old enough to have heard it before. As it ended we all looked at each other in stunned silence and then one of us said, “What the F just happened?”

After listening to about five or six different performances of this symphony in order to write this post, the sentiment remains. Go ahead, listen to it. You won’t because you’ve got too many emails to answer, but on the off chance that you do listen to it from start to finish — maybe with a few friends — see if you don’t end up saying, “What the F just happened?”

For the record, EMI is now owned by Warner and they are marketing the crap out of von Karajan 26 years after he died.