Tell us your secret musical phobias at the bottom of this article

On the brink of the Southbank Centre’s ten-concert series Revealing Tchaikovsky, presented from next Wednesday by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, I come before you with an awful and embarrassing confession. I don’t like Tchaikovsky.

No, that’s too blunt. How could anyone brush into the dustbin one of the world’s greatest writers of melody, a superb orchestrator, a piercing musical dramatist, sometimes an adventurous experimenter with form, and the most inspired and congenial of all composers for the ballet? I can’t. I won’t. Yet the fact remains that of all the cornerstone figures in classical music, excepting the prolix Wagner, Tchaikovsky remains the one most capable of making me feel unwell.

Especially when the Pathétique symphony is playing. Especially when the conductor is heightening decibels and emotions feverish enough to begin with. It’s that self-dramatising, neurotic and morbid aspect of Tchaikovsky that I find hard to take: the side that lends itself to orchestral melodrama, big yanks at the heartstrings and volcanic moans, repetitive cymbal clashes at climaxes: the side that encouraged Ken Russell to direct that most vulgar biographical film, The Music Lovers. This is music that preens itself, that lives on its nerves and expects the listener to do the same. My stiff upper lip can’t take it.

Is this a peculiarly English reaction? National notions of taste and decency perhaps creep in a bit. They did 70 years ago when the composer Julius Harrison carped in The Musical Companion about Tchaikovsky “going the whole hog”, arousing physical emotions rather than stimulating the mind. How positively horrible!

But the distaste of a repressed middle-class Englishman cannot be the whole story. Though a handful of ubiquitous works such as the Pathétique, the first piano concerto and the 1812 Overture have made this singular talent one of the world’s most popular composers, Tchaikovsky has always stirred criticism along with praise, from the time of his first performances. The composer and critic César Cui, one of his Russian peers, dogged him for years with astringent judgments, while the pianist and teacher Nikolai Rubinstein famously dismissed his first piano concerto as “worthless”.

In 1881 the Viennese critic Edouard Hanslick pinpointed the violin concerto as proof that music could “stink the ear”, while for the Bostonian W. F. Apthorp in 1898 the Pathétique traversed “all the foul ditches and sewers of human despair”. During bouts of self-doubt Tchaikovsky expressed his own reservations, criticising Francesca da Rimini and The Tempest for “affected ardour and false pathos”.

The good news for us Tchaikovsky sufferers is that on paper this forthcoming season, organised by that thinking conductor Vladimir Jurowski, might almost be designed to rid us of our distress. Well, we shall see. But note the surrounding blanket of other Russian composers; note the exclusion of many of Tchaikovsky’s most familiar works in favour of the more neglected, including the Suite No 3, a genuine charmer. Note too Jurowski’s decision to deliver the Romeo and Juliet overture and Act IV of Swan Lake, not with his London Philharmonic, but with the lean period instrument sound of the OAE.

Tchaikovsky, you could say, is being put on a diet — something especially welcomed by Jan Schlapp, the OAE’s vice-chairman and co-principal viola player, who admits to her own queasy feelings about the composer. “You’ve got to get away from self-indulgence in his music,” she says, “from musicians just letting rip.”

Jurowski stoutly defends the Pathétique (not in the season) and places any blame for overheated performances with the composer’s interpreters rather than Tchaikovsky himself, or the type of instruments being played. “The tradition of overexuberant and sentimental Tchaikovsky playing comes from the US, primarily from Leopold Stokowski, who was the first to record a complete Tchaikovsky symphony, the Fourth, in 1928.

“That performance set a benchmark,” he says. “But that’s not the Russian way of performing Tchaikovsky. The tendency there is to interpret him as a classical composer. I see him as a brilliant musical craftsman, and the elements of his music that Stravinsky and the choreographer Balanchine liked, the classical poise, are very important to me.”

No surprise, then, that Jurowski plays down any close links between the music and Tchaikovsky’s turbulent personal life — the homosexuality, the disastrous marriage, the mother love — and sees the music as expressing the composer’s innermost feeling in a heightened, transcendental way. The music, he says, is no more autobiographical than Mahler’s.

Faced with The Music Lovers, with its Freudian drooling, its torrid love scenes and staccato editing on the soundtrack’s fortissimo chords, I’d love to be able to cut any knot between life and work. But is it possible? Tchaikovsky told his beloved patron Madame von Meck that his works, with only a few exceptions, had “been felt and lived by me” and came “straight from the heart”. Listening to him at his most hand-wringing, with a rash conductor piling on the agony, it can be very hard to locate the Tchaikovsky who thought Mozart was “the Christ of music”, with a “healthy, wholesome temperament, not yet corroded by reflection”.

So what can I do about my Tchaikovsky affliction? I should listen hard, obviously, and widely, perhaps away from the emotional blockbusters toward smaller items, the chamber and vocal music. And listen to level-headed interpreters of a composer described by Jurowski as “this strange figure, neither Russian nor European in his music, neither animal nor bird, like a bat”. Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Batman.

The Revealing Tchaikovsky season is at the Southbank Centre, London SE1 (0871 663 2590), from Oct 22 to Nov 7 2008

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