Daniel Muller-Schott Performs Tchaikovsky

Tchaikovsky is well-known for his emotional Romantic music, his turbulence and melancholy, but his homage to Mozart with Variations on a Rococo Theme expresses his and his generation’s nostalgia for Mozart’s earlier world of refined elegance and restraint. 

It started in 1876 as a score for cello and piano, but Tchaikovsky’s cellist overlaid his own version of the cello and passed it to publishers. The so-called Fitzenhagen version lives on, as it does in this SSO Concert, so sublimely played by guest cellist Daniel Muller-Schott. 

He masterfully runs a gently civilised, alternating conversation with the orchestra, which under French conductor Lionel Bringuier is given the airy space to “speak”.  It’s breathtaking when Muller-Schott’s moody strings reach, like a human in reply, to the very highest, finest chords.

The concert begins with Paul Dukas’ The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, based on Goethe’s ballad, itself derived from an ancient Greek satire.  Most of us know it from Walt Disney’s animated film Fantasia. When hearing that relentless march of the activated broomsticks fetching water, it’s impossible not to see Mickey Mouse as the apprentice desperate to reverse the spell.

It’s a thrilling scherzo, richly building to clashing symbols and roaring brass and, finally, just a squirt. Dukas is known for little other music, mostly because he was very self-critical and threw most of it out.

From an animated mouse to a lovelorn puppet, Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka was commissioned for Diaghilev’s Ballets russes.  Beginning with clashes of fairground noises, organ grinders, snatches of circus drum rolls and folk songs, it’s a scintillating score from a very busy orchestra, as the Showman brings alive his puppets to the sound of a flute.   And striking instrumental vignettes burst out, soaring sky high like fireworks, only to be replaced instantly by another. 

Violins, clarinets, flutes, trumpets, horns and percussions are all working overtime. Petrushka is killed and then exposed as a mere puppet, even as his ghost appears above.  

Martin Portus

Image credit: Sydney Symphony Orchestra