they don't make it like this anymore

When I was in the shop the other week I rediscovered this music, Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, Allegro Moderato. I love the unexpected paths that Tchaikovsky takes, and my favourite transition begins around the 5:50 mark. You will hear the frenetic buildup, then its peak and release of musical energy.

He began piano lessons at age 5 and could read music as well as his teachers within three years, but then his parents turned away from his music education and he only picked up the piano again when his mother died from cholera when he was 14. Music was not a priority at his school, but he went to the opera and theatre regularly. After graduation he began a there-year-long civil service career, as his instructors said that nothing suggested Tchaikovsky could be a potential composer or even musician.

Then, in 1861, he attended classes in music theory taught by Nikolai Zaremba through the Russian Musical Society. The following year he followed Zaremba to the new St Petersburg Conservatory. From 1862 to 1865, he studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba. Anton Rubinstein, director and founder of the Conservatory, taught him instrumentation and composition. Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's talent.

Tchaikovsky demonstrated the Romantic ideals of color, emotional expressiveness, and dramatic intensity. Tchaikovsky was also typically Romantic in his choice of subject matter in his operas and symphonic poems. He leaned toward doomed lovers and heroines — Romeo and Juliet, Francesca and Paolo (Francesca da Rimini), Tatiana (Eugene Onegin), even the title character from his abandoned opera Undina. Sometimes, as in his final opera, Iolanta, and in his final tone poem, The Voyevode, the love music could outshine the rest of the composition, especially if the music or story was otherwise sub-standard.

Many people today feel that Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, which had to be kept a secret form Russian society, enhanced his overall works. This intensity of personal emotion flowing through Tchaikovsky's works was entirely new to Russian music, and remains beautiful and moving into the present in a way in which few composers can achieve.