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 Trostinets, near Kharkov 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".[1]
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.
