Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

[Jaakko Keskinen]

Rachmaninov is one of my all-time favorite composers!

Top 5:

The Miserly Knight
The Rock
The Bells
Isle of the Dead
Prince Rostislav

[kyjo]

That likely is a result of the tight thematic unity. The slow movement is based almost entirely on the second theme of the first movement, just as the scherzo elaborates its first theme; And that second theme, with its exotic augmented 2nds, got as emotive as it was going to in its first movement incarnation. In the finale all of the first movement's themes are reintegrated and transformed anew — with a different, tragic, outcome. Rachmaninoff's First is arguably among the most systematically organized symphonies of any era with respect to its thematic processes.

Indeed, the tight thematic unity of the First Symphony is quite remarkable and only adds to the work's powerful impact.

[kyjo]

I can only nod my head along with you, Kyle. The first symphony from Rachmaninov has been a work that I've never quite warmed to.

Well, John, it's really only the slow movement that I have slight reservations about. I love the work as a whole.

[kyjo]

Rachmaninov is one of my all-time favorite composers!

Top 5:

The Miserly Knight
The Rock
The Bells
Isle of the Dead
Prince Rostislav

He's one of mine as well! Since we're doing top 5s, mine would be (in no particular order):

Symphony no. 1
Symphony no. 2
Piano Concerto no. 2
The Bells
Symphonic Dances

[Mirror Image]

Well, John, it's really only the slow movement that I have slight reservations about. I love the work as a whole.

I haven't really figured out this symphony is really why I haven't warmed to it. Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3 are outstanding however. Many people felt disappointed by the third symphony, but I think it's quite strong and has an almost Neoclassical feel to some of the musical ideas.

[Cato]

Rachmaninov is one of my all-time favorite composers!

Top 5:

The Miserly Knight
The Rock
The Bells
Isle of the Dead
Prince Rostislav

He's one of mine as well! Since we're doing top 5s, mine would be (in no particular order):

Symphony no. 1
Symphony no. 2
Piano Concerto no. 2
The Bells
Symphonic Dances

Symphonies Nos. 2 & 3 are outstanding however. Many people felt disappointed by the Third Symphony, but I think it's quite strong and has an almost Neoclassical feel to some of the musical ideas.

Amen to all the above!  Interesting: by chance I was just listening to the Third Symphony yesterday.  What has always interested me especially is the middle movement, which combines a slow movement with a Scherzo, and in a way inverts the usual Scherzo form of A-B-A, where "B" is a little slower in contrast to the "A" movements (check any Bruckner Scherzo for a rigorous lesson in that form!  .

Here the "A" outer movements are the slower sections and "B" is the fast center.

[Karl Henning]

Great stuff.

[kyjo]

Amen to all the above!  Interesting: by chance I was just listening to the Third Symphony yesterday.  What has always interested me especially is the middle movement, which combines a slow movement with a Scherzo, and in a way inverts the usual Scherzo form of A-B-A, where "B" is a little slower in contrast to the "A" movements (check any Bruckner Scherzo for a rigorous lesson in that form!  .

Here the "A" outer movements are the slower sections and "B" is the fast center.

Yes, the structure of the slow movement is quite ingenious! I love the opening of the movement - a horn solo accompanied by strummed harp chords creates a "legendary" atmosphere which almost seems more akin to, say, Bax than Rachmaninoff!

[Cato]

Today's (Sept. 18, 2018) Wall Street Journal has an article about a recording of Rachmaninoff discovered in the archives of Eugene Ormandy, who (apparently) had recorded the composer secretly. 

Joseph Horowitz writes:

One of the saddest and most paradoxical artistic exiles of the 20th century was Sergei Rachmaninoff, who fled the Russian Revolution and wound up in New York and Los Angeles, in equal measure celebrated and obscure.

Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) left Moscow a composer and conductor of high consequence who also played the piano. Yet in America he barely conducted and his compositional output plummeted. To earn a living, he turned himself into a keyboard virtuoso of singular fame and attainment—a late embodiment of the heroic Romantic piano lineage beginning with Franz Liszt. Offstage, he retained a lonely Russian home and Russian customs. His severe crewcut and gimlet eyes disclosed little to the world at large. His personal poise was awesome and implacable.

Rachmaninoff's privacy took other forms. He refused permission to have his concerts broadcast, effectively preventing any documentation of what he sounded like in live performance. Instead, he recorded extensively for RCA. But, absent the oxygen a body of listeners can activate, those readings are as celebrated for their emotional control as for their sovereign interpretive mastery. They enshrine kaleidoscopic miracles of color and texture wedded to a vice-like command of musical structure. But the cap remains on the bottle.

No longer. A decade ago, a researcher was browsing a collection left by the conductor Eugene Ormandy to the University of Pennsylvania—and read: "33 1/3:12/21/40: Symphonic Dances...Rachmaninoff in person playing the piano." That is: Ormandy had privately recorded Rachmaninoff playing through his "Symphonic Dances" prior to Ormandy's premiere performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra in January 1941. This turned out to be no morsel, but 26 minutes of a 35-minute composition. And it's now embedded in a three-CD Marston set titled "Rachmaninoff Plays Symphonic Dances." The result is one of the most searing listening experiences in the history of recorded sound.

Most of the best piano recordings are made in concert. They're not as perfect as studio products, but by and large they're more spontaneous, more intense, more creative. Vladimir Horowitz, an intimate friend, claimed that only one of Rachmaninoff's commercial recordings—that of the second movement of his own First Concerto, recorded in 1939-40—gave a fair impression. If you listen to that recording, you'll easily ascertain what Horowitz was talking about—it's untethered.

As privately imparted to Ormandy, Rachmaninoff's impromptu solo-piano rendering of his "Symphonic Dances" documents roaring cataracts of sound, massive chording, and pounding accents powered by a demonic thrust the likes of which no studio environment has ever fostered. Rachmaninoff's humbling presence, re-encountered, is gigantic, cyclopean.

And there is more: the piece itself; it is Rachmaninoff's valedictory. Summoning his waning creative energies in this last major work, he fashioned his musical testament. The dances originally bore titles: "Midday," Twilight," "Midnight." These are stations of life. The finale ends in a blaze of glory; near the close, Rachmaninoff inscribed: "Alliluya."

But the work's most poignant moment comes in the first movement coda, which cites and pacifies the "vengeance" motto of the confessional First Symphony, a youthful effusion Rachmaninoff discarded following its disastrous 1897 premiere. It is music as naked as the nostalgic Rachmaninoff of the Second Piano Concerto is decorous: a baring of the soul. The First Symphony was completely unknown in 1940 (only in 1944 was a set of parts discovered). And so Rachmaninoff's allusion in the "Symphonic Dances" is a soul-baring even more private than his piano-rehearsal with Ormandy. In terms of his creative odyssey—his exile and accommodation in a strange land—it is nothing less than a closing of the circle.


How does Rachmaninoff himself perform this secret passage, the meaning of which was his alone? Very slowly, lingeringly. Even more affecting is his treatment of the movement's second subject, a long saxophone melody he invests with a heaving surge and ebb of feeling, imparting a trembling undertow of anguish, of memories faraway and yet unresolved. The second movement waltz, under Rachmaninoff's fingers, is an essay in macabre shadow-play. The final dance is primal. The work emerges as an iconic leavetaking as bittersweet as any Mahler Abschied.

I own a 10-volume 1954 edition of "Grove's Dictionary of Music" that allots to "Rakhmaninov" less than a page. It contains the sentence: "The enormous popular success some few of [his] works had in his lifetime is not likely to last, and musicians never regarded it with much favour." Today that sentiment is as forgettable as Rachmaninoff is imperishable.

The little box containing these Rachmaninoff memories within memories includes other rarities. I cannot imagine a better introduction to this artist at his true worth. It stands as a rebuke to the slickness that often passes for Rachmaninoff interpretation nowadays. More than a lost art, it documents a lost world.

[George]

Today's (Sept. 18, 2018) Wall Street Journal has an article about a recording of Rachmaninoff discovered in the archives of Eugene Ormandy, who (apparently) had recorded the composer secretly. 

Joseph Horowitz writes:

Yes, that is being released on Marston records in a 3 CD set. I got my copy over the weekend.

[Cato]

Yes, that is being released on Marston records in a 3 CD set. I got my copy over the weekend.

We await your review!

[George]

We await your review!

My review is mixed. I thought the Rachmaninoff solo performances had far too much noise to be able to hear/enjoy them. And i am someone who collects historical recordings. The rest was actually more enjoyable. Most enjoyable of all was the 1940s broadcast performance of Moiseiwitsch/Boult playing the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody.

[Cato]

Recently I investigated the recording of the Fourth Piano Concerto by Alexander Ghindin with Vladimir Ashkenazy conducting the Helsinki Philharmonic.

[asin]B00005O6BZ[/asin]


The consensus seems to be that the original should not have been revised in any way.

I like the original very much also!  What say ye?  Any preferences, or is it like the Prokofiev Fourth Symphony or the Bruckner Third Symphony, where you might like all the versions? 



 

[North Star]

Hm, I have those recordings in the Decca Complete Rachmaninov set, but I don't think I've ever listened to them.    Must try to fix that soon.
E: Done.   I enjoyed the original version very much, but I'd have to listen to it and the revision again to comment on the value of the revision.

[Cato]

Hm, I have those recordings in the Decca Complete Rachmaninov set, but I don't think I've ever listened to them.    Must try to fix that soon.
E: Done.   I enjoyed the original version very much, but I'd have to listen to it and the revision again to comment on the value of the revision.

We await your opinion!

To be sure, The Rach's revision of the First Concerto was on target! 

[Cato]

An article by Geoffrey Norris (of The Telegraph from Sept. 15, 2001 on the resuscitation of the Original Version of the Fourth Piano Concerto:

FOR nearly 75 years, a full-scale concerto manuscript by Rachmaninov, signed, dated and written in his own neat hand, has been languishing unplayed and neglected. Anybody interested in it knew exactly where it was and what it was, but it is only recently that a happy conjunction of events and opportunities has provided the impetus for the piece to be performed. This month it is being given in New York, and released on CD.

The autograph manuscript in question is that of the Fourth Piano Concerto - but not in the form we generally hear it today. Modern performances use the substantially revised edition that Rachmaninov made (and recorded) in 1941. The one that has now been given new life is the original, unpublished version that the composer completed in 1926, but which has not been aired in public since he himself played it in 1927.

A few years ago, a group of us - all friends and fellow Rachmaninov researchers - got together with the idea of making this initial version more widely available.

My own involvement with the composer's music goes back about 30 years, since before the first publication of my book on him in 1976. Subsequently, the book has been expanded, and the title of it has changed from Rakhmaninov to Rachmaninoff, thus neatly exemplifying the first knotty problem that any writer on him has to deal with - how to spell his name. "Rakhmaninov" follows a strict transliteration of the Cyrillic script, "Rachmaninoff" is the way the composer himself wrote his name in the West, and is the family's favoured spelling. "Rachmaninov" is a third, long-established alternative.

The senior member on our Fourth Concerto exercise was Robert Threlfall, who has an unparalleled knowledge of Rachmaninov's scores, and is a gifted pianist. It was he who gave the first London concert performance of the (revised) Fourth Concerto in 1947, and who published an illuminating book on the composer in 1973. He and I produced a detailed catalogue of Rachmaninov's music in 1982, and, even before our concerto project was up and running, he had already done much comparative work on its various versions.

Our group was further bolstered by the Dutch Rachmaninov scholar Elger Niels, whose idea it originally was that we should all collaborate, and by the American expert Dr David Cannata, who has written ground-breaking studies of Rachmaninov and has made editions of his music for the publisher Sikorski.

Looking back on the way our respective duties were assigned, it is clear that the other three were going to do all the hard graft and that I was to undertake the glamorous bits. Nothing new there, some might say, but anyway my first job was to secure a copy of the manuscript from the Library of Congress in Washington DC. For that, we needed the permission of Alexandre Rachmaninoff, the composer's grandson, with whom I was on friendly terms.

As it happens, we were both going to be at a symposium about his grandfather at the University of Maryland, close to Washington, in the spring of 1998. He granted permission; we went up together to the Library of Congress, and I flew back to London bearing a photocopy of the manuscript.

Our plan was that the other three in our group would then have the arduous task of preparing a score and orchestral parts, though in the event this was taken on by Boosey & Hawkes, Rachmaninov's principal publisher. My next job was to find somebody to perform it, and here there was a stroke of luck. Selflessly pursuing my sybaritic brief, I was spending a weekend as a guest of Alexandre Rachmaninoff at the Swiss villa that his grandfather built on the shores of Lake Lucerne. Vladimir Ashkenazy, who lives on the other side of the lake, came over for drinks. In conversation it turned out that our Fourth Concerto idea fitted in perfectly with a plan of his own to conduct and record the first version of the First Concerto, with the Helsinki Philharmonic and the pianist Alexander Ghindin. The Fourth would make an ideal coupling. From then on, it was plain sailing, and both concertos were recorded for the Ondine label in Helsinki's Finlandia Hall in March this year.

So, why did we decide to set this project in motion? The fact is that the Fourth Concerto has never sounded quite right. The music, particularly in the finale, has a truncated feel to it. And there is good reason why that should be so, because Rachmaninov made hefty cuts to it. The concerto had been germinating in his mind during his last years in Russia, but only after he had emigrated in 1917, and when he needed a new concerto to add to his own repertoire as a pianist, did he sit down and finish it. Immediately, he was alarmed by how long it had become, joking to his friend, the pianist and composer Nikolai Medtner (to whom the concerto is dedicated), that it would have to be performed on consecutive nights, like Wagner's Ring.

He nevertheless went ahead with the premiere, playing it on March 18, 1927, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski, but soon afterwards he began to take the blue pencil to it, principally with a view to making it more concise, but altering details of orchestration and piano figuration as well. A revised score was published in 1928, but the concerto still failed to please either Rachmaninov or his audiences and critics, and he decided to drop it from his repertoire until he could have another look at it. In 1941 he made even more cuts to produce the third version (published in 1944) that is generally played today.

There is a lobby of opinion - including, it must be admitted, Ashkenazy himself - which reckons that Rachmaninov would have been better advised to discard the finale and write a new one, because the musical material lacks the strength and substance to match a first movement that Ashkenazy regards as a "masterpiece, absolutely wonderful, nothing like he composed before, one of my favourite Rachmaninov movements".

But, since that is no longer an option, the resuscitation of his first version, without any of his later cuts and tinkerings, provides the opportunity to hear a more balanced, broadly conceived score.

As with many of these things, you rather wish there could be some sort of amalgam, because by no means everything Rachmaninov later did to the Fourth Concerto is detrimental. But that is not an option either, and certainly Alexander Ghindin, the pianist on the new Ondine disc, finds it much easier to fathom the finale's psychological development in this early, uncut score. Listeners to it will find a lot of unfamiliar passages, making for a more natural flow between certain sections that, in the final version, sound disjunct. It could well be that, in time, this early version will come to be preferred. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4725604/Bringing-Rachmaninov-back-to-life.html

[relm1]

Quick survey, which do you prefer the original or final versions of Piano Concertos No. 1 and 4?  For me, I prefer the original.  One of the things I most adore about him is his structure.  I believe the original versions had greater structure compared to the final versions whereas the final versions were taught but at a cost to his structure feeling somewhat disjointed.  Another example, his Symphony No. 2 which had many cuts to me feels best in its original form.  He was a master and transformation and development.

[Cato]

Quick survey, which do you prefer the original or final versions of Piano Concertos No. 1 and 4?  For me, I prefer the original.  One of the things I most adore about him is his structure.  I believe the original versions had greater structure compared to the final versions whereas the final versions were taught but at a cost to his structure feeling somewhat disjointed.  Another example, his Symphony No. 2 which had many cuts to me feels best in its original form.  He was a master and transformation and development.

I am a fan of the Original Fourth Piano Concerto!  A much more novelistic and emotionally powerful work than the revision.

With the First, I think the revision is the better one, because it separates the work more from Grieg's concerto.  Still, the Urfassung of the First is not bad by any means!

And yes, the complete version of the Second Symphony is the only one to have!

[relm1]

I have always adored early Rachmaninoff.  For example the gorgeous and powerful "The Rock" but I have no idea what it is actually about.  This sounds like programmatic music telling an epic and possibly ancient tail.  What is the story the music is telling?

[Cato]

I have always adored early Rachmaninoff.  For example the gorgeous and powerful "The Rock" but I have no idea what it is actually about.  This sounds like programmatic music telling an epic and possibly ancient tail.  What is the story the music is telling?

Try this:

Dark, sombre – an old man. A light arpeggio theme with a solo flute – a young woman. Two characters from a poem written by the Russian Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov.

A golden cloud slept for her pleasure
All night on the breast of the gaunt rock.

During the summer of 1893, Sergey Rachmaninov composed a symphonic poems apparently inspired partly by Lermontov's poem: The Rock, Op. 7. The two quoted lines are found as an epitaph on the first published score. However later he refuted his initial idea and claimed that his piece reflected a story by the writer Anton Chekhov called "Along the way". The old man and the woman meet on Christmas Eve in a tavern while a storm is raging outside. The man recounts his sad life, his failures, his regrets, while the woman listens with much compassion. In the morning she has to leave and the man is left behind, gradually being covered by the falling snow until he resembles a rock.

And here is a website with the story by Chekhov:

http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1197/