Just last month I was lamenting the termination of MHS's contract with the British Lyrita Company. But things have a way of balancing out, for the termination of Russian Melodiya' s contract with one of the celestial superpowers of recorddom turns out to be to the advantage of the Society's members. For here is the first of two installments of the "complete" Tchaikovsky symphonies in that resplendent recording by the Moscow Radio Symphony under the direction of Gennadi Rozhdestvensky that some of us less affluent folk have been coveting for some time now.

There's a reason for putting "complete" in quotation marks: this set includes those completed symphonies that Tchaikovsky numbered 1 through 6. Back in his Columbia days, Eugene Ormandy recorded a synthetic Symphony No. 7, pieced together by one Semyon Bogatyryev from the composer's sketches and some sections he had orchestrated (amounting to 33 pages), the discarded Andante and Finale from the third piano concerto (Tchaikovsky had given up on the symphony and "cannibalized" part of it for the concerto, which, in the end, he found too long), and a Scherzo from the Op. 72 piano pieces. That was fifteen years ago, and I see no evidence that the work has been accepted into the canon. And then there's the book-and-record outlet that daily bombards me with catalogs (no paper shortage there) which advertise a set of '' all seven Tchaikovsky symphonies." Here No. 7 turns out to be "Manfred," which, though in four movements, is properly designated as a symphonic poem.

Of course we take the six symphonies for granted today. Schwann lists six complete sets (three issued by one company!) and at least two more have come and gone. Just for fun, however, I checked my 1940 Victor and Columbia catalogues. Columbia offered one recording each of the three last symphonies, two of them conducted by Willem Mengelberg, one (No. 6) by Philippe Gaubert. (The Mengelberg performances were also apparently available on the cheap American Deccas, though these may have been older "takes.") Victor, still in 1940 the top dog, offered two No. 4's (Stokowski and Koussevitzky), a No. 5 by Stokowski, and two No. 6's (Koussevitzky and Ormandy). It also, surprisingly enough, had a No. 3 conducted by the Russian-English Albert Coates; this probably dated back to the late 20's or early 30's, since I recall that Coates did little recording after that. (But I remember seeing him in a film more than a decade later conducting Gracie Allen in her famous Concerto for One Finger and Orchestra.)

I assume that we were introduced to No. 1 via a Victor recording of the Indianapolis Symphony under Fabien Sevitzky. In those days the unions hadn't priced American orchestras off the recording market. Sevitzky began life as Koussevitzky, and, like his famous uncle, he was a virtuoso on the bull-fiddle. He headed the Indianapolis orchestra for nearly twenty years. I made my first and last operatic appearance under his baton as a member of the offstage chorus in the Easter scene from "Cavalleria." I recall my amusement when he, after some rapid calisthenic warmups, jeteed past us onto the stage for his entrance. I found him generally an uninspired conductor, which is probably why to this day I am lukewarm about the symphony in question.

It has been said that the Romantic composers, at least outside of Germany, were not comfortable with the formalism and the abstractness of the symphony. Despite his reputation as a great symphonist, this would seem to fit Tchaikovsky. The famous three, he hinted, were written with programmes in mind, almost certainly autobiographical or confessional. The First makes no bones about being pictorial; the first two movement also play with loneliness and desolation. It cost the composer no end of grief. He was suffering the slings and arrows of a reviewer's attack on his choral setting of Schiller's ode to joy, and it has been conjectured that he was also trying to come to terms with his sexual hangups. He finally suffered a nasty emotional collapse; this he attributed to working at nights and never did so again. Had he asked me, I could have told him. The First is, to my way of thinking, a pretty work, but diffuse and not very Tchaikovskyan.

At some point in the 1940's Igor Stravinsky fell in love with the 2nd Symphony, and it is the only non­Stravinskyan work that I recall hearing him conduct. The first American recording, however, was probably that of the Cincinnati Symphony under Sir Eugene Goosens. (I say "probably" about the earliest records of Nos. 1 and 2, because WERM lists 78's on the Symphony label by the Santa Monica Symphony ( ! ) under Joseph (?) Rachmilovich--strangers all, to me!)

Tchaikovsky didn't dub this symphony the "Little Russian," but the sobriquet is o.k., since he uses a number of Ukrainian tunes in it. Here the composer seems less involved with himself and his problems than in any of the others. The first performance was a smash, but seven years later Peter Ilyitch had another look at the piece, decided he didn't like it, rewrote the first movement, and monkeyed extensively with much of the rest of it. That's the version we have to live with, though Taneiev always insisted that the original was infinitely preferable. The first and last movements are dominated by the folk-themes, and I suspect that it was that insistent and bacchic dance-tune in the finale that got to Igor Fedorovitch. The second movement, however, is the wedding-march from the early opera "Undine" which Tchaikovsky disowned and destroyed. (Three scenes, however, turned up much, much later and may be heard on a Westminster recording.)

My first recording of the 3rd was not Coates's, but a later one by the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, D.C. under Hans Kindler. I was living in Washington when it came out, and had a number of friends among the orchestra's musicians and went regularly to its concerts, so I had a certain sentimental feeling about the recording. But it wasn't really very good. Kindler was a Dutch 'cellist, and a good one, but his conducting, despite a great deal of athleticism and growing-red-in-the-face, rarely seemed to generate much enthusiasm among the players.

So far as I can find out, there are no Polish themes in this work. The last movement, however, is in polonaise-time, which fact was enough to permit Sir August Manns, originator of "pops" concerts in London, to call it the "Polish" Symphony. Tchaikovsky seems to have written it (rather rapidly) as therapy for his most recent breakdown, precipitated by Nicolas Rubinstein's very unfriendly rejection of the piano concerto and, according to Herbert Weinstock, by some blackmailing by some young-men-about­town. Considering all this inward turmoil, the symphony is surprisingly abstract and carefree--something more like the orchestral suites than like the works that were to follow--and shall change very shortly. Typically, the composer decided he didn't like it, didn't like the premiere performance, and didn't like the reviews. He was not easily pleased.