Coming Soon, 'Beloved Friend': Semyon Bychkov's Tchaikovsky Project

October will see the release of the first recording in Semyon Bychkov's Tchaikovsky Project with the Czech Philharmonic on Decca, featuring two of the composer's most popular works: the Romeo & Juliet Fantasy Overture and the Pathétique Symphony.

Bychkov is spending much of 2016 and 2017 immersing himself in the music of a composer whose music has fascinated him since early childhood, and the forthcoming recordings are just one aspect of his 'Beloved Friend' initiative: named for a phrase in Tchaikovsky's letters to his patron and inspiration Nadezhda von Meck, the project will also include a trilogy of concerts with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican in the autumn, followed by a three-week residency with the New York Philharmonic early next year (with soloists including Yefim Bronfman and Kirill Gerstein).

Bychkov, who recorded the Pathétique in the late 1980s with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, recently described the symphony as "a musical auto-biography of Tchaikovsky’s short life...Tchaikovsky had reached the point of being able to express in his music the entire life cycle within one continuous arch, with laconic austerity and inevitability."

The exact scope of the series is still to be confirmed, but the second instalment (including the Third Symphony and Serenade for Strings) is scheduled for release in Autumn 2017.

You can watch a brief interview with Bychkov about the project, and his lifelong love-affair with Tchaikovsky's music,

here.

Recent and related recordings from Semyon Bychkov