I confess I had forgotten the origin of the nickname of Tchaikovsky’s folksy and gamesome Second Symphony. It’s the shortest of his six symphonies, and the most Russian – so ‘The Little Russian’ makes sense.
It was his good friend Nikolay Kashkin who first used the name. ‘How I love your little Russian, ’ he is said to have exclaimed. ‘All those delightful Ukrainian folk tunes.’ This at a time, of course, when Ukraine was routinely referred to as ‘Little
