Romantic Fates: Tchaikovsky’s Towering Fifth by Mendelssohn, Bruch, Tchaikovsky, P. I., pen 25 spa 2024, Nuo (2024/2024), Dirigentas Antonio Méndez, Jacobs Music Center, San Diego, United States

Antonio Méndez returns after his terrific SDSO debut last season with a program bursting with overwhelming romantic feelings, surging love-songs and hair-tingling premonitions of melodramatic tragedy and fate. Mendelssohn’s surging and brilliantly orchestrated overture compresses into less than 10 minutes the essence of a play by the French poet Victor Hugo (celebrated author of Les Misérables): a poor poet falls in love with the Queen of Spain, with disastrous consequences for both of them. Max Bruch pours out one melody after another in one of the best-loved violin concertos of all time. And Tchaikovsky thrills us with the tumultuous operatic energy of his Fifth Symphony, complete with doom-laden trumpet-calls, dreamlike dance sequences, rushing strings, and in the slow movement a love song for the solo horn that is one of the sweetest and most heartfelt moments from anywhere in the marvelous composer’s output.