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08/31/2017 12:01 AMListen to the music of Tchaikovsky, says Hershey Felder, and you can often hear the heart ache.
That sadness is an important part of the personal story of the famed Russian composer of such masterworks as The Nutcracker Ballet and Swan Lake. And it’s one that Felder dealt with in the solo show Our Great Tchaikovsky that played recently at Hartford Stage.
“I feel for him because he suffered greatly,” says Felder, referring to the composer’s homosexuality. “I have great compassion for him. Some of his story hurts so much. He suffers and he cries in his music and we’re the beneficiaries of it.”
Felder portrays Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky as “rather kind, generous and sweet, too, though he was troubled—but not darkly troubled. He wasn’t clueless like some ‘lost’ artist,” says Felder. “He just didn’t have the luxury of being able to speak about it as we do today. And that’s a lot of this story.”
Felder notes that Russia has still to acknowledge the homosexuality of that country’s greatest composer.
Our Great Tchaikovsky is the latest of Felder’s solo shows behind a piano. Other musical portraits include Felder as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Liszt, Leonard Bernstein, Irving Berlin, Frederic Chopin, and, most famously, George Gershwin in George Gershwin Alone, which he performed in 2004 at Hartford Stage. (He also presented Monsieur Chopin at Hartford Stage in 2006.)
After its record-breaking world premiere at the San Diego Repertory Theatre, the San Diego Union-Tribune called it, “A powerful, emotional experience well worth seeing.”
Felder also directed The Pianist of Willesden Lane starring virtuoso Mona Golabek. In the solo work about her mother Linda Jura, a young Jewish musician’s dreams are interrupted by the Nazi regime. That show also played Hartford Stage in 2015 as well as Westport Country Playhouse last year.
Felder says modern computer metrics show Tchaikovsky is the most popular composer in the world, based on sales, programs, and uses of his music.
Among Tchaikovsky’s music that is excerpted in the show are pieces from the ballets Sleeping Beauty, Swan Lake, and The Nutcracker; concerto pieces “Violin Concerto, Piano Concerto no. 1” and “Rococo Variations for Cello”; the opera Eugene Onegin; orchestral pieces “Romeo and Juliet,” “The 1812 Overture,” “Marche Slav,” and “Symphony No. 6, Pathétique.”
Just nine days after Tchaikovsky conducted the premiere of Pathétique in St. Petersburg, he died suddenly at the age of 53. Our Great Tchaikovsky explores “the mystery surrounding his death while paying homage to the composer and his music,” says Hershey.
“[The music] is accessible at the same time it’s brilliant,” he says. “It’s inventive. Its also crazy and even the crazy part is accessible. It’s not just intellectual. First of all it’s melodic. It’s endless supply of melody.”
The prolific Felder has been performing his musical pieces for 20 years, performing more than 4,500 live performances, but he says he will be moving on to other personal projects soon.
“I’m going to be 49. And I am more than 10 years older than when Gershwin died,” says Felder. “I’m not a kid anymore and I want to focus on the things I set out to do in the beginning of my career which is creating new works of musical theater.”
He said he was not interested in licensing his work to others. “I’ve been encouraging people to do their own versions rather than take my script. I tell them to tell their own stories in their own way.”
Felder says she’s working on an unnamed piece for Nathan Gunn that will open next spring.
“It’s a marvelous story with the most glorious voice in the world,” he says
Felder says he has one more musical story that he wants to present, a musical based on the relationship between composer Sergei Rachmaninoff and Anna Anderson, who claimed to be Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, the youngest daughter of the last Tsar and Tsarina of Russia, Nicholas II and Alexandra.
Felder’s come to the right stage. Hartford Stage produced the musical Anastasia last year, which is now playing on Broadway
Frank Rizzo is a freelance journalist who lives in New Haven and New York City. He has been writing about theater and the arts in Connecticut for nearly 40 years.