Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 1 19 - 25 November 2019

It's not the first time that we enter the world of the fairy tales with Spira mirabilis: a few years ago it was Maurice Ravel who introduced us with his 'Ma mère l'Oye', Mother Goose, to the characters of Charles Perrault, and in Ravel's ballet the fairy tales were meticulously accompanied by music that would almost be self-explanatory - music which not only described the characters but often transformed into characters. Now, for the first time, we take a closer look at the composer which is universally known as one of the most related to the fairy world, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose music belongs to many of us since childhood but whom we haven't dared to approach yet with Spira. And although it's not a ballet this time, and one won't encounter Sleeping Beauty, the King of Mice or a girl that has been transformed into a swan, the first Symphony, composed by night under the effect of a hallucinated nervous tension, is fairy-tale-like already in its title: "Winter Daydreams". But the cold and melancholic atmosphere that traverses through the whole composition (most obviously in the marvellous Adagio with the oboe theme at the beginning…) and that more than once one finds next to a waltz and cheerful Russian folk tunes, leaves us feeling lost: where does this 'winter journey' lead us, which is the forgotten land that we're learning about? Today the fairy tale of Tchaikovsky is unfinished, the neurosis and misery of the young Russian composer begin to leak through, and only the absolute beauty of this dreamy music remains to save us.