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Vibrato has been a subject of lively debate in the discussion of performance practice for a couple of generations now, but usually when we talk about orchestral vibrato, we mean string vibrato, and, usually,  we’re talking about abstaining from said string vibrato.
 
This often leads to some very strange musical outcomes when modern orchestras get all the strings playing a Beethoven symphony or concerto without vib while the woodwinds wobble away as usual. How is that musically credible? And when you add vocal soloists, the effect can be even more nonsensical, even comical. It just goes to prove that it’s easier to tell 20 world-class section violinists to abstain from the vibrato they spent thousands in music school learning to acquire than to ask for the same from a rogue flutist or soprano. Or maybe it’s also hard to convince a stubborn principal string player to set aside the views on historical performance practice and listen to the soloist they are accompanying and try to match?
 

More vibrato, please!

But in some traditions, there is strong evidence that we should be more aware of the use of vibrato in other sections. In both the Czech and Russian traditions, there is a rich vocabulary of brass vibrato (generally not wanted in the USA, UK and Western Europe) which you can hear in the very orchestras which only a few generations earlier were premiering the major works of Dvorak and Tchaikovsky in partnership with those composers.

 
If you listen to this recording of Leningrad (St Petersburg) Philharmonic (the oldest orchestra in Russia) looking for brass vibrato, you’ll have to be patient. They use it selectively and with great control, but the warm vibrato in the famous horn solo in the 2nd movement gives it a vulnerability and humanity which is really special. It’s a pity we don’t hear more of this kind of playing in the West and it seems to be going extinct in the East. And when trumpets turn on the vibrato at key moments, it adds real ecstatic energy to the sound. 
 
I’m teaching this incredible symphony to the second incarnation of the ESO Youth Orchestra this week. Mravinsky’s interpretations of Tchaikovsky are both radical and, after 60 years since they first appeared on LP, nearly canonical. More than anything, he shows how much more powerful this music is when you play it with real respect for the text and without any self-indulgent sentimentality. Perhaps in some of the slow music, that lack of sentimentality tips over into a lack of space and colour, but there are plenty of other conductors you can go to who bring a warmer heart to this music. Likewise, his main tempo in the last movement, while exciting, doesn’t have much to do with Tchaikovsky’s actual markings. He manages to rob himself of the possibility of realising those passages (piu animato, Molto vivace and Presto) which Tchaikovsky says should be faster than the main Allegro vivace.
But Mravinsky brings fire, precision and intensity, and that’s a potent combination in Tchaikovsky.