[click for a larger view]
A friend in Italy who lost his father to the Coronavirus asked me to arrange the last movement of the Tchaikovsky Symphony No. 6, his father's favorite piece, for string sextet.
Working on it has been quite an emotional experience for me, and I hope that having this arrangement helps my friend and his mother in their grief. Not being able to grieve in conventional ways is one of the many tragic consequences of this pandemic. This movement of this particular piece sings of the essence of what we are all living through now. Remember that Tchaikovsky wrote this symphony during the cholera pandemic (1881-1896), and he didn't live to hear the premiere.
You can find the score and parts on this page of the IMSLP, and you can also find it here.
If you would like to listen to a computer-generated midi (it is rudimentary, and some of the tempo changes didn't make it through) you can listen here.
Does anyone reading this have skills to put together a video of six people playing this from their different places in isolation?
No comments:
Post a Comment