Tchaikovsky – Symphony no. 5 and Slavonic March op. 35

After completing the Third Symphony (1875) and the Fourth Symphony (1878), Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky did not turn to writing another symphony for 10 years. Although the composer resumed work on this form in 1885 in the Manfred Symphony, he did not include it in the numbered series, since it belonged to the genre of programme music. (The second piece on the recording, Marche Slave [Slavonic March] was written shortly before the Fourth Symphony as an occasional work for a benefit concert on behalf of the victims of the Turkish- Serbian War.) It was only after his first European tour in April 1888, when he conducted his own works and received the long awaited appraisal in Berlin, Paris and London, that he felt the energy to write a new symphony. Nonetheless, work on it was arduous and slow at the start. On May 30 he wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, that he was about to “squeeze a symphony from my benumbed brain”. He seems to have overcome this minor crisis very quickly, however, for the first draft of the work was already completed by June 22. The composer finished the orchestration on August 14 and writes contentedly to his friend and patroness: “I may say that this symphony does not take a back seat to the earlier ones.”