The Storm was Tchaikovsky's first substantial work for orchestra, written when he was only 24. He was spending the summer at the family estate of Prince
Aleksey Vasilievich Golitsyn at
Trostyanets, near
Kharkiv in
Ukraine, and wrote the overture as a vacation exercise. He did not consider it worthy of publication, and it was never performed in his lifetime. This opinion may have been influenced by
Anton Rubinstein, who disapproved of it, and by
Herman Laroche, who said it represented "a museum of antimusical curiosities". In the summer of 1865–66, Tchaikovsky reworked the opening of the piece as the
Concert Overture in C minor. This was also not performed or published in Tchaikovsky's lifetime.
The Storm was first performed, posthumously, in
Saint Petersburg on March 7, 1896, conducted by
Alexander Glazunov. It was published by
Mitrofan Belyayev, as Op. 76. The "Poco Meno Mosso" section of the piece is also used as the main theme for the second movement of his
Symphony No. 1 in G Minor "Winter Dreams". The
Concert Overture in C minor did not have its first performance until 1931, in
Voronezh, under the baton of
Konstantin Saradzhev. ==Notes==