If you ever are fortunate enough to study music history with a teacher who is both a scholar and a musician, you will learn that there are many wonderful works created in the last ca. 2500 years. In a standard university course you would be given a listening list. As centuries, artistic movements and history fly by, the comitted teacher will also point out other works, of no-less musical significance, but that cannot afford to be considered historically canonical.
One such work that Stephen Emmerson once pointed out to me was Tchaikovsky's Serenade for Strings Op. 48. Tchaikovsky generally gets short shrift in Music history mainly on account of the fact that Brahms and Wagner were having a magnificent and drawn out aesthetic dispute over the role of drama and music, when Tchaikovsky was at the peak of his compositional game. I thought nothing more of this untillast night when I was discussing music at a dinner in Copenhagen with T.S. Anand (Indian entrepreneur and mild mannered Seikh).
TS, in a throw away line admitted that he considered Tchaikovsky' Serenade to
be the most marvellous piece ever written. I raced home and bought a recording. . . it doesn't disappoint!
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