‘Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Emelyanychev & Tetzlaff’

It is what every composer fears: never to hear a performance of a work they have written. That was Modest Mussorgsky’s fate with his Night on Bald Mountain, which was only premiered after a thorough reworking by Rimsky-Korsakov, five years after Mussorgsky’s death. Only then did his witches’ sabbath finally come to life. The October Revolution and the Great War also put a spanner in the works for the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. He was forced to flee and did not hear his First Violin Concerto until 1922. The violinist Christian Tetzlaff defends this lesser-known key work with passion. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky snatched his Sixth Symphony from death by a whisker. He conducted this final symphony nine days before he died in 1893. Did he sense the end of his life approaching? It seems that he did: the passionate Adagio sounds like a farewell to life.