Tchaikovsky at Palau de la Música

Piano Concerto No. 1, Swan Lake and the 1812 Overture, three essential pieces by the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and icons of romantic music, can be heard at Palau de la Música from 9pm on 10 January. These works will be performed by the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine, a formation with seven decades of experience who have already performed at the Palau and in Barcelona on several occasions.

The concert will open with the Piano Concerto No. 1, the most famous of the three concertos for piano that Tchaikovsky composed. Surprisingly, the virtuoso pianist Nikolai Rubinstein, upon being presented with the work described it as "banal, clumsy and badly written," adding that it was also badly composed and impossible to interpret. Its public debut was in Boston on 25October, 1875, when it was performed by the German pianist Hans von Bülow.

The orchestra will go on to perform excerpts from Swan Lake, the first of the three ballets written by Tchaikovsky. Premiered in 1877 at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, it was initially greeted with a certain indifference, and success did not arrive until 1895 at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. This fairy tale like piece tells the story of the impossible love between Prince Siegfried and Odette, a young queen who was turned into a swan.

The concert will conclude with the 1812 Overture, an orchestral composition that was written to commemorate the Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia. This symphonic poem blends Russian folk music, religious compositions, the Tsarist Russian national anthem and fragments of the French national anthem.