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Visitors to Russia's first museum of LGBT culture, which opened in St. Petersburg on November 27, are greeted by a portrait of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.Tchaikovsky – the 19th century composer of the Nutcracker, among other works – is arguably one of the most famous gay Russians.Pyotr Voskresensky – a more contemporary gay Russian – got the idea to open the museum after a visit to Tchaikovsky's house in Klin. "The estate and the house interiors were completely scrubbed," Voskresensky told Radio Free Europe. "There was no hint of the composer's personal life.""The context of the opening of this museum is...

The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra scrubbed the famed composer from an upcoming program, calling his music "inappropriate at this time."In light of Russia's invasion into Ukraine, many westerners are understandably doing their level best to distance themselves from President Vladimir Putin and those loyal to him. But some of those gestures look increasingly like performance art. The latest utterly pointless sanction is the Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra's announcement that it would remove music by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the Russian composer, from its all-Tchaikovsky concert, calling it "inappropriate at this time." In the last week, conductor Valery Gergiev and superstar soprano Anna Netrebko...

The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra is facing ridicule after removing the Russian composer Tchaikovsky from its forthcoming programme dueThe Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra is facing ridicule after removing the Russian composer Tchaikovsky from its forthcoming programme due to the conflict in Ukraine. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, which celebrates Russia’s victory against the invasion of Napoleon, was due to be included in the orchestra’s upcoming Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but the entire programme has been abandoned due to events in Ukraine. to the conflict in Ukraine. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture, which celebrates Russia’s victory against the invasion of Napoleon, was...

The orchestra had an all-Tchaikovsky concert scheduled for next week, but has decided to change the programme having deemed it to be 'inappropriate' at this time The Cardiff Philharmonic Orchestra has removed Tchaikovsky from its programme of its upcoming concert ‘in light of the recent Russian invasion’.Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture was due to be included in the orchestra’s upcoming all-Tchaikovsky concert at St David’s Hall on 18 March, but it was considered by the orchestra ‘to be inappropriate at this time’.The orchestra will instead present a programme centred around Dvořák’s Symphony No. 8, with John Williams‘s The Cowboys Overture opening the...

"The people controlling Joe Biden have just erased the Constitution for good. All that is now required for a citizen to lose all rights to own property or conduct business in any way is a simple accusation of Russian ‘involvement.’ The American Thinker explained: Executive Order Canceling the Constitution On April 15, President Biden signed an Executive Order on Blocking Property with Respect to Specified Harmful Foreign Activities of the Government of the Russian Federation. Contrary to its title, this EO is not about Russia. It is designed to allow the Biden administration to deprive American citizens and organizations of...

I came across this while searching for a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. I enjoyed the music even more, seeing their interpretation and the Russian crowd’s enthusiastic response. Ilinykh – Katsalapov, Swan Lake, 2014 Olympics

OverturePeanut Brittle Brigade (March)Sugar Rum Cherry (Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy)Entr'acte (Mini-overture)The Volga Vouty (Russian Dance)Arabesque Cookie (Arabian Dance)Chinoiserie (Chinese Dance)Toot, Toot, Tootie, Toot (Dance of the Reed Pipes)Dance of the Floreadores (Waltz of the Flowers)

On May 18, 1891, a lovely spring day, at 3 o’clock, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky arrived in Philadelphia without fanfare. There was to be a concert of his music that evening, the last he would conduct in the United States. The dervish tour had begun on April 26 in New York City, where he had been invited by Walter Damrosch, director of the New York Symphony for the grand opening of what was then called “Music Hall” (later to be formally designated as Carnegie Hall). That invitation was supported by no less a luminary than Andrew Carnegie himself. In New York,...

With a body of work of 169 compositions, whose genres include symponies, concertos, operas, ballet, chamber music and even a choral setting of the Russian Orthodox Divine Liturgy, Tchaikovsky composed some of the most popular theatrical music within the classical repertoire. He was the first Russian composer to acquire a solid reputation and career abroad, to the point that he appeared at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall in New York in 1891. Tchaikovsky studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he received a western-oriented teaching that set him apart from the nationalist Russian composers known as “The Five,” with...

Special to the Star-Telegram One year after his death, hundreds of items from the estate of Van Cliburn are going on sale at Christie’s auction house in New York. The pianist, who died in February 2013, filled his Westover Hills home with items encountered during his world travels — fine art, furnishings, tableware — and selected with a veteran collector’s eye. Two years ago, Cliburn parted with some of his most valuable treasures at a Christie’s auction of what was billed as “The Van Cliburn Collection.” That sale earned almost $4.4 million, beating a presale estimate of $3 million. The...

A prominent Russian screenwriter working on a film about Tchaikovsky’s life that has just received state financing set off a firestorm this week by saying that the biopic would not focus on the composer’s sexuality because “it is far from a fact that Tchaikovsky was a homosexual.” “Only philistines think this,” the screenwriter, Yuri Arabov, told the newspaper Izvestia of the commonly accepted view of Tchaikovsky’s sexual orientation. “What philistines believe should not be shown in films.” Mr. Arabov, who is known for his screenplays for films by Alexander Sokurov about the inner lives of Lenin, Hitler and Emperor Hirohito,...

http://safeshare.tv/w/OXHZUxUXXN Video at link. This will put a smile on your face.

Cookouts, fireworks and the "1812 Overture." On the Fourth of July, we hold these truths to be self-evidently American, right? Don't light the cannon fuses just yet. The "1812 Overture" may be an American tradition, with its patriotic strains and thunderous battery. But while orchestras across the land, including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra tonight at Point State Park, will perform it with clanging bells and cannon fire, the music could hardly be any more distant from the Stars and Stripes. That's because the overture, written by famed composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, depicts Napoleon's retreat from Russia in 1812, not America's...

Watch the tiger on the left. This, ladies and gentlemen, is how you quit a ballet company in style... You know some stage manager backstage was flipping his s*** when he saw that

Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky's ''Nutcracker'' will be performed on stages from small towns to the New York City Ballet this month -- and in ''literally hundreds of productions around the world,'' according to Jeffrey Milarsky, music director and conductor of the Columbia University Orchestra. That, along with the ''1812 Overture,'' ''Swan Lake'' and certain other works, means that Tchaikovsky, as Milarsky says, ''is played more than any composer.'' Yet where Milarsky and other members of the classical music establishment herald a revival of esteem for Tchaikovsky during recent years, Milton Babbitt, 86, a giant of the serialism movement in modern composing,...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGiz_qbViE0&NR=1

Pyotr Tchaikovsky INTRODUCTION Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya under Imperial Russia). He was the son of Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer in the government mines, and the second of his three wives, Alexandra Andreyevna Assier, a Russian woman of French ancestry. He was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Pyotr began piano lessons at the age of five, and in a few months he was already proficient at Friedrich Kalkbrenner's...

Some time ago, in my eternal quest to set the record straight, I suggested that the true hero of the motion picture industry wasn’t Thomas Edison or D.W. Griffith, not Chaplin or Keaton, not Jack Warner or Louis B. Mayer, but the anonymous fellow who first came up with the notion of putting salt on popcorn, thus turning packing material into a concession stand bonanza that costs more per-pound than lox and caviar put together. But there are others who, more often than not, get overlooked while far too much praise is lavished on actors and directors. I refer to...