Tchaikovsky sketched this exuberant sextet in 1890 while composing The Queen of Spades in Florence. Despite the Italian title, it is gloriously Russian at heart: a surging first movement, a serenade with a melting violin–cello duet, and two folk-flavoured finales driven by fizzing fugal energy. Tchaikovsky found writing for six equal voices fiendishly hard, “six independent yet homogeneous parts,” he groaned, but the result sounds like effortless joy.
