Tchaikovsky distrusted his Fifth. He conducted the premiere himself, in St. Petersburg in November 1888, and came away convinced the symphony was “too patchy, too pinched, too insincere” — his words, not mine. He was wrong, of course, spectacularly wrong, but the anxiety embedded in that self-judgment tells you something essential about what this music demands from a director: a willingness to live dangerously inside it, to let the seams show, to let the whole thing teeter occasionally on the edge of vulgarity before pulling back. Safe passage through this symphony is no passage at all.
Yondani Butt is, by any measure, a capable conductor. His Beethoven recordings with the London Symphony showed genuine musical intelligence and a clean technical command. What he brings to Tchaikovsky’s e-minor symphony is professional, well-prepared, and — ultimately — too comfortable.
The first movement runs just over sixteen minutes. That’s not inherently damning; Barbirolli took his time too, and the result was something vast and valedictory. But Butt’s spaciousness doesn’t accumulate that kind of weight. The opening clarinets — that fateful motto theme, the thing that will haunt every subsequent movement like a ghost that refuses to stop knocking — emerge with suitable atmosphere, a nicely graded diminuendo into the recapitulation. But as the movement progresses toward its final pages, the music seems to lose its gravitational pull rather than increase it. There’s a slack quality around the thirteenth minute, where the pulse feels less like deliberate restraint and more like simple hesitation.
The slow movement’s horn solo — that long, aching melody that Tchaikovsky reportedly composed while thinking about love and fate simultaneously — is played cleanly enough, if without much erotic urgency. Secure intonation, reasonable color. But the strings underneath it, and indeed throughout much of the movement, have a curious quality: full-bodied and well-blended, but somehow muffled at the center, as though the players were producing tone rather than feeling it. Abbey Road’s warm acoustic doesn’t help distinguish this; the sound is lush and rounded, perhaps too rounded. Gergiev’s Philips album with the same orchestra — now there the strings are always leaning toward something, always pressing against the next bar with a kind of physical insistence that makes even the quietest phrases feel inhabited.
The Valse lacks lift. That’s really the simplest way to say it.
The finale, marked Andante maestoso, carries the burden of Tchaikovsky’s peculiar solution to his symphony’s long struggle with fate — the motto theme transformed from shadowy menace to triumphal brass proclamation in E major. It’s a solution some conductors (Mravinsky, Bernstein in his ferocious DG reading) make you believe in completely, through sheer force of conviction. Butt achieves nobility without achieving necessity. The brass are warm and unanimous. The timpani arrive on cue. But there’s no sense that anything has been won.
The coupling, The Voyevoda symphonic ballad, is the more interesting discovery here. Tchaikovsky based this late orchestral piece — one of his last completed works, premiered just two years before his death — on a grim Pushkin poem about a husband who orders his servant to murder his young wife, only to find the servant fallen in love with her instead. The piece is dark, harmonically restless, and not nearly well-known enough. Butt and the LSO give it a pointed, atmospheric reading; the orchestral colors here are sharper than in the symphony, the ensemble more focused. This is the performance on the disc I’d return to.
As for the Fifth: it joins a very large shelf. Not dishonorably — there are no real failures here, no ensemble breakdowns, no interpretive decisions that make you wince. But in a repertoire this competitive, where Mravinsky’s old Leningrad recording still crackles with something close to terror, and where even middle-of-the-road versions by Jansons and Paavo Järvi bring a distinctive profile to every movement, simply being solid and professional isn’t quite sufficient. Tchaikovsky himself worried the symphony was insincere. Butt’s reading, whatever its virtues, doesn’t entirely dispel that worry.
