While briefly browsing YouTube earlier this morning, I stumbled on a live feed of a concert celebrating the 80th birthday of Alexander Tchaikovsky. No relation to that Tchaikovsky, but he is the other one’s nephew.

I first fell in love with Alexander Tchaikovsky’s music a few years ago, via a recording of his Piano Quintet from 1989. Appropriately enough, as I soon found out the piece has a stateside connection: it was commissioned by an American chamber ensemble, who played the world premiere in Dallas.

The work I heard today, an opera-oratorio, was far more epic in scope, right down to its title: The Tale of Boris and Gleb, their Brothers Yaroslav the Wise and Sviatopolk the Accursed, of Daring Bandits, and the Good Russian People. It was all impressively conducted by the Ecuadorian conductor Freddy Cadena, previously known to me only through an obscure recording of Luis Humberto Salgado’s Sixth Symphony, with an excellent multimedia semi-staging that heightened the score’s blurring of time-space.

Having only listened to the last two-thirds of it, my thoughts are still not totally collected about this work. (I intend to hear it in full tomorrow.) There is no doubt, though, that this is vital music; its glittering, luxurious scoring and harmonies making its essential savagery all the more potent.

Tremendous.