Hershey Felder Our Great Tchaikovsky

My opening impression must be how utterly impressed I was by Felder’s stamina. This man never let up for nearly two hours of non-stop piano playing, strutting around the stage and narrating the tale of Tchaikovsky’s life. It was a most impressive performance. If you are a fan of Tchaikovsky’s music I would whole-heartedly recommend this play. If you are not a fan of his work then I would say this is not the show for you (although to be fair you probably should have worked that out from the title).

Now I must admit I am an utter philistine when it comes to classical music; I can’t tell my Mozart from my Beethoven. This is not to say I do not enjoy classical music, but I am terrible at remembering names and have been all my life. And music is all about names. You must remember the name of the composer, the name of the song, the name of the album/symphony. I am pretty terrible at modern music too, but in those cases, if I hear something I like, I can usually write down one of the lyrics of the song and look it up later. This does not work for classical music, which usually has few lyrics I can follow, so while I may enjoy the piece, I have no clue how to look it up later. In short, while I might often recognise music, I will have no idea who composed it and what it is called (and to be fair I usually don’t recognise the music. I went to see the Magic Flute the other day and was told there were some famous sections in it. After seeing the whole thing I had no clue what these famous sections were. Nice little show at the Soho theatre though). Anyway, I have seriously digressed. The point of this is that I was quite impressed by just how much of the music I recognised. It was quite nice whenever I heard a piece and thought, ah, I know this piece (ok, so I didn’t know what it was called, but I have low standards when it comes to recognising music, and seeing this show they were met). So, I would recommend this performance to anyone who wants to see how much Tchaikovsky they actually know; I found that a nice experience.

The set is attractive, and it was quite nice to sit back and enjoy an evening of classical music interspersed with the context of each piece explained throughout, although I felt the Russian accent was somewhat overdone. It was perhaps a little lengthy. I was exhausted by the end, and while I know it kept the continuity going well I felt an interval would not have gone amiss; 1 hour 40 minutes of Tchaikovsky is a bit intense. But overall the show did what it said on the cover; it was an overview of the composer’s life nicely interspersed with his music. Quite moving at times, and Felder’s humorous scorn at his critics was very entertaining. For someone who knows nothing of Tchaikovsky it is quite the education lesson.

Finally, the other bonus is of seeing this play and writing this review is I think I finally know how to spell Tchaikovsky, something I was never able to do before now…good to know I’m still learning (although I probably will forget this information soon, I don’t know how much future cause I will have to write his name).