Tchaikovsky menagerie

Suddenly Labor Day Weekend is upon us. The ship is turning. Summer is slipping toward the western horizon and frivolous activities are being replaced with serious endeavors. The pastoral Major League Baseball begins to yield to the military industrial complex of the National Football League. Vacations decay into semesters and the Summer Pops at the Embarcadero comes to an end. The start of the symphony season is about a month away.

The Pops isn’t going away quietly, though. The 1812 Tchaikovsky Spectacular will fill the skies this weekend with the traditional fireworks display to accompany the 1812 Overture. Yet this isn’t just a sugary concert with a cream filling.

The opening piece on the program is Tchaikovsky’s Overture to Oxana’s Caprices. This is way off the beaten path. The YouTube clip has all of 15 views. YouTube is not the arbiter of the value of a composition but 15 is not a lot of ears and eyeballs.

The concert is starting with the unknown Oxana and then progressing to the better known and masterful Serenade for Strings then to the beloved Suite from Swan Lake before ending with the wildly popular 1812 Overture. It’s a compact journey through the compositional life of Tchaikovsky.

The overtures, both obscure and popular, bookend his most serious Serenade and the greatest of his ballets. Tchaikovsky also composed the Serenade and the 1812 Overture at the same time. The Serenade received the bulk of his attention and emotion while he considered the 1812, written for the dedication of a cathedral, to be something of a tossed-off piece. He claimed to have composed it “...without warmth and without love.”

Tchaikovsky may have withheld his warmth and love from his most famous child but the world has adopted it and given it all the love a lonely little piece of music could ever want.

The concerts are September 4, 5, and 6 at Embarcadero Marina Park South. All concerts start at 7:30 p.m.