The Places
Our tour of Russia starts in St. Petersburg, including churches and palaces, and, above all, the River Neva, on the banks of which Peter the Great's city stands. We visit Tchaikovsky's house at Klin, near Moscow, and travel south to Ukraine to see Sebastopol in the Crimea and Odessa. Finally we return to St. Petersburg, seeing the surrounding countryside, the city by night, the bridges and the people.
The Music
Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky succeeded in uniting strands of Russian musical nationalism with music in the cosmopolitan forms of his training. He spent his childhood and adolescence in St. Petersburg, later moving to Moscow and finally finding some refuge in the country at Klin, where his house is preserved. The music accompanying our tour is Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto and his Serenade for Strings.
