What must you have heard from the great repertoire of classical music? Tchaikovsky's Fifth.
Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 5 begins with a funeral march, and it characterises everything that follows - right up to the triumphal march in the finale. There is an ambiguity in this finale and in the entire symphony, and Tchaikovsky himself criticised it harshly: "There is something repulsive in it, patchwork, insincerity and artifice". Today, this work is one of his most famous, precisely because it is so multi-layered and tells a new story in every performance.
Calogero Palermo, solo clarinet, plays an excerpt from it for us.
