The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Eastman: Symphony No. 2 – Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 (Remastered) (2025)

This digital-only recording features the Second Symphonies of Julius Eastman and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky—works that, despite being separated by over 100 years of history, share a remarkable vibrancy and hidden sentiment that continue to resonate today.

This new release from The Cleveland Orchestra and Franz Welser-Möst was recorded live at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Concert Hall at Severance Music Center in April 2023 (Eastman) and October 2023 (Tchaikovsky).

About Eastman’s Symphony No. 2 (by Kira Thurman): Julius Eastman was a brilliant and deeply affective composer, a man light-years ahead of his time. Born in New York City and raised in Ithaca, New York, he was a student at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia before joining a vibrant new-music scene at SUNY Buffalo. Early on, his works demonstrated a capacity to shock, awe, and thrill.

If Eastman was musically progressive, his identity as an unapologetically out Black gay man was equally radical in some circles in the 1970s. “What I am trying to achieve is to be what I am to the fullest,” Eastman remarked in a 1976 interview. “Black to the fullest, a musician to the fullest, a homosexual to the fullest.” It may appear to some that each of those categories exists independently of the others, but to Eastman, they were all necessary components of his identity that could not be separated — nor did he wish for them to be.

Unfortunately, by the 1980s, Eastman’s life had begun to fall apart. Unable to secure a permanent faculty appointment and on bad terms with his family, he became difficult to locate, residing either outdoors or in homeless shelters. He died in a Buffalo hospital in 1990 from cardiac arrest at age 49. Only eight months after he died did a notice appear in any newspaper or media outlet.

Eastman’s Second Symphony, dedicated to his former lover and a chronicle of their failed relationship, is an example of the musical bravery and deep affect that Eastman is known for expressing. The work requires 100 musicians and takes anywhere from 12 to 20 minutes to perform. It offers opportunities for asynchronous and improvisatory music-making, but the challenge is to ensure that the ensemble also performs certain musical phrases or cadences in time at the right moments.

The symphony itself is a mix of droning with articulated musical phrases that prod at the ear, building up slowly in thickness and richness in its orchestration. In Eastman’s inscription of the work, he writes: On Tuesday, Main and Chestnut at 19 o’clock, The Faithful Friend and his Beloved Friend decided to meet. On Monday the day before, Christ came, just as it was foretold. Some went up on the right, and some went down on the left. Trumpets did sound (a little sharp), and electric violins did play (a little flat). A most terrible sound. And in the twinkling of an eye the Earth vanished and was no more. But on Tuesday, the day after on Main and Chestnut at 19 o’clock, there stood the Lover Friend and his Beloved Friend, just as they had planned, embracing one another.

The ending of the symphony portrays just that: two former lovers, standing in darkness, grieving from heartbreak, unsure of what, exactly, comes next.

About Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 2 (by Maria Sonevytsky): Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is said to have found inspiration for his Second Symphony while relaxing at his sister-in-law’s estate in the Ukrainian village of Kamianka (about 250 miles south of Kyiv), where he heard the folk songs of rural Ukrainian peasants, who had been emancipated from serfdom less than a decade earlier. Though some claims about the Ukrainian provenance of folk materials used in the symphony are contested — specifically, the song referenced in the first movement, Down the River Volga, which was likelier thought of in Tchaikovsky’s time as a Russian folk song — no one disputes that the rousing Finale of the symphony is based on a still-popular Ukrainian children’s song, Zhuravel’ (The Crane).

In Tchaikovsky’s Finale, the hummable tune is introduced plainly and then, over a series of increasingly brassier variations, interrupted by a lyrical countermelody of his own devising, developed to a bombastic conclusion. The premieres of both the original and the now-canonical revised versions of the symphony were held in the most important cities in Imperial Russia: Moscow (1873) and St. Petersburg (1881). Even Tchaikovsky’s most rancorous critic, the composer César Cui of the Russian musical nationalist clique known as the “Mighty Five,” allowed that the Finale was “magnificent.”

Perhaps because of the clear use of the Ukrainian tune in the Finale, the Russian music critic Nicholas Kashkin dubbed the symphony as “Little Russian” — a demeaning name adopted in Imperial Russia to refer to the territory of Left Bank Ukraine that had come under Tsarist domination in the late 18th century. By the 19th century, according to the historian Andreas Kappeler, the term had “acquired the pejorative meaning of the inferior part of Russia.” At the same time, though, a surge of nationalism brought profound transformations in Ukrainian society: a boom in Ukrainian literature and the resurgence of Ukrainian vernacular and classical music, the nascent imaginings of something like a national community.

However, orchestras around the world subsequently performed Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony with the programmatic title “Little Russian.” In light of the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many have since pivoted away from this title, instead calling it the “Ukrainian” Symphony in honor of those who have lost their lives, those who were displaced, and those who continue to valiantly defend their homeland.

TRACKLIST

1. The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Eastman: Symphony No. 2, "The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved"
2. The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 17: I. Andante sostenuto - Allegro vivo
3. The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 17: II. Andantino marziale, quasi moderato
4. The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 17: III. Scherzo. Allegro molto vivace
5. The Cleveland Orchestra & Franz Welser-Möst - Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 17: IV. Finale. Moderato assai