OU on the BBC: Discovering Tchaikovsky - About the season

The Open University

The Tchaikovsky Experience celebrates the life and music of one of the most popular figures in western classical music in an unprecedented season across television, radio and online.

Programmes on BBC One, BBC Two and BBC Four will feature glorious performances by the Mariinsky Opera and Ballet companies, the Royal Ballet and the BBC Philharmonic.

In February, Radio 3 will clear the schedules for a week to broadcast Tchaikovsky's complete works in tandem with those of another great Russian composer, Igor Stravinsky.

And the season comes to a spectacular close on 16 February with a live broadcast of the 1812 Overture performed by the BBC Concert Orchestra at London's Imperial War Museum.

The Open University has joined forces with BBC Four to bring a fresh perspective to the interplay between Tchaikovsky's life and works. For Discovering Tchaikovsky, conductor Charles Hazlewood explores two of the composer's key works.

In the first programme he examines the “Fantasy Overture” from Romeo And Juliet -considered Tchaikovsky’s first mature masterpiece. Working with the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Charles explores how Tchaikovsky distilled the essence of Shakespeare’s great romantic tragedy into music. He also looks at the composer’s earliest versions of the piece and the programme ends with a complete performance of Romeo And Juliet.

The second programme focuses on the first movement of Tchaikovsky’s final work, and what many regard as his greatest achievement – the Sixth Symphony, "The Pathetique", which premiered only a week before his death.

For each piece of music, Charles Hazlewood dissects the score itself, working through the music and explaining and analysing key points in the material with the orchestra performing fragments of the score to illustrate his points. There then follows a full performance of the score, filmed at the spectacular Empress Ballroom in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens.

First broadcast: Saturday 27 Jan 2007 on BBC FOUR