Unreasonable Demands

In last week's podcast, Peter McGuire and I talked a bit about the challenge he'll be facing when he takes the stage as a soloist in this week's Inside the Classics concerts. For an orchestral player to step into a solo role is more difficult than you might imagine, and on top of simply playing the Tchaikovsky concerto, Peter will also be a full participant in the first half of the program, playing excerpts from the piece and talking about the strange and ultimately triumphant backstory behind it. To be perfectly honest, I'm feeling more than a little bit guilty about it all, since Peter honestly had no real idea of what would be expected of him in this show when he agreed to play the concerto more than a year ago. But Peter is one of those guys who would probably smile and nod agreeably if you asked him to play the Bach Chaconne while walking barefoot across a bed of hot coals, so if he's at all worried about the unusual nature of these performances, he hasn't let on.

These unusual demands on a soloist's skills, however, did put me in mind of another challenging performance of a Tchaikovsky concerto that I once saw, courtesy of the boys from Monty Python...