Recording of the Week, Tchaikovsky from Alpesh Chauhan and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra

I never expected that one of the most memorable operatic experiences of my life would take place in an abandoned ballroom on the edge of a reservoir in Edgbaston - but that’s exactly what happened in the spring of 2019 when Birmingham Opera Company staged an innovative, immersive production of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, brilliantly directed by the late Graham Vick and just as brilliantly conducted by local boy Alpesh Chauhan, who marshalled his unconventionally-distributed forces (including a large community chorus) with razor-sharp precision and ensured that no detail of the score went unnoticed despite the rather challenging acoustic.

The Tower Ballroom, alas, is now in the process of being demolished, but Chauhan’s star is very much in the ascendant: those performances of Lady Macbeth won him the Newcomer of the Year Prize at the International Opera Awards, and an OBE plus appointments with the Düsseldorfer Symphoniker and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra followed hard upon. It’s with the latter orchestra that he makes his recording debut today, in a programme of symphonic fantasias by Tchaikovsky where the themes of magic, storms and forbidden love loom large.

First up is the 1891 ‘symphonic ballad’ The Voyevoda (no relation to the early opera of the same name), with which the composer was so disappointed that it almost didn’t survive: after the premiere he warned his publisher that ‘if something like this happens again, I shall tear it to shreds’, and we have composer and pianist Alexander Siloti to thank for salvaging it for posterity by rescuing the orchestral parts and reconstructing the score. 

Had Tchaikovsky heard it in a performance as persuasive as Chauhan’s, I feel he might have ceased to browbeat himself for ‘dirtying paper’: certainly it’s a piece which needs a firm hand on the tiller and an acute ear for balance, but that’s exactly what we get here from the outset. This really is a score that goes from 0 to 60 in under a minute, a barely-audible rumble in the basses rapidly mounting to a stormy night-ride as Tchaikovsky depicts a suspicious warlord hastening home to discover his wife in flagrante: Chauhan paces it to perfection, ensuring that you feel every bump in the road and every surge of adrenaline along the way.

The textures here could easily disintegrate into melodramatic mush in lesser hands (and with lesser engineers on the case), but by keeping the string sound lean and incisive until it’s finally allowed to bloom in the central love-scene Chauhan wrings maximum tension from the score – and the climactic murder (not perhaps the one you might expect, unless you happen to know the Adam Mickiewicz poem which inspired the piece) shocks as it should.

Next up is the aptly rich and strange symphonic poem inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a relatively early composition which already reveals a master orchestrator at work; Chauhan’s emphasis on balance and clarity pays real dividends during the eerie calm before the storm, and also in the scherzo-like passages depicting Ariel. And when the heavens do eventually open in a cacophony of shrieking woodwinds, swirling strings and antiphonal brass, Chauhan lets every single player off the leash to electrifying effect whilst making sure that even the tiniest detail registers loud and clear. 

The Overture and Polonaise from the supernatural comic opera Cherevichki are given with bags of colour and character, and made me want to hear this infrequently-staged work in full some day. But the highlight of the album is a blood-curdling, beautiful account of the Dante-inspired Francesca da Rimini, written shortly after Tchaikovsky heard Wagner’s Ring Cycle at Bayreuth – the Descent to Nibelheim was evidently still ringing in the composer’s ears when he came to depict Dante’s journey down into the underworld, and here again Chauhan’s ability to conduct up a storm will take your breath away. The tutti chromatic scales are immaculately synchronised, every spiralling detail in the strings and woodwinds is crystal-clear, and the ensuing love-music all the more affecting for not being over-sentimentalised.

In short, Chauhan’s Tchaikovsky is indeed the stuff dreams are made on, and the next instalment can’t come soon enough.