Lorin Maazel, in his sixth and penultimate year at the helm of the New York Philharmonic, did something nervy: He staged a Tchaikovsky festival. Why is this nervy? Well, don’t you know? Tchaikovsky is supposed to be sentimental dreck for sentimental dopes. Virgil Thomson and misguided others taught us that long ago. And contemporary music directors of major orchestras are supposed to stage festivals of Ligeti, Birtwistle, Glass—you know, the hip. Maazel’s staging of a Tchaikovsky festival was destined to make establishment critics see red. And so they did. And that festival was a success, commercially and artistically.

Maazel maintains that Tchaikovsky is a well-known composer but not a well-understood one—and I share that view. Tchaikovsky was a refined, imaginative, and deep individual. He was also a genius. Moreover, though thought of as the ultimate in Romanticism, he was at least as much a Cl ...