With the recent bout of Siberian weather in Montreal, last night’s evening of Russian music at the Maison Symphonique felt positively balmy. Under the baton of Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, and featuring his wife Viktoria Postnikova on piano, the OSM’s performance of two works by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky brought a little warmth to our snow-frozen city.
Overshadowed by far better-known and more frequently performed companions in his oeuvre, Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in G and the Manfred Symphony have received their fair share of criticism. Their length and stylistic oddities require strong force of will to pull off in performance – some performers (such as pianist Alexander Siloti) have gone so far as to make their own amendments.
