Celebrating the Rare Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd and 3^rd Piano Concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the two sets of Piano Preludes, the 2^nd Piano Sonata, the two sets of Études Tableaux, the 2^nd Symphony, the All Night Vigil, The Bells, the Vocalise… These highly popular works will this year be heard even more abundantly than they already regularly are as the 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth is being widely celebrated around the world.

In fact though, they comprise only a small percentage of Rachmaninoff’s prolific and very diversely varied body of creations, many of which are rarely performed. How often do we hear more than just a handful of the almost 90 inspirationally inventive songs that he composed between 1893 and 1916? Or the extraordinarily precocious opera Aleko, which truly astounded the Moscow Conservatoire authorities when Rachmaninoff submitted it for his graduation examination in 1892 at just 19 years old? Or the strange Oriental Sketch for Piano and the posthumously published Piano Prelude in D Minor, written almost simultaneously in late 1917 when the deeply anxious composer knew he would not be able to remain in his home country following the Russian Revolution? And what about the adventurously innovative Russkie Pesni (Three Russian Folk Songs for Chorus and Orchestra), written in exile in 1926, with two haunting homesick laments of loss followed by a risqué earthy challenge to a wife-oppressing husband?  

There is much, much more music that is still neglected, including piano, orchestral, choral and chamber works that are only very occasionally heard anywhere: just take a look at Decca Classics’ exemplary 32CD set Sergei Rachmaninoff - The Complete Works to view the scale of the neglect. Although a lot more of the composer’s fertile oeuvre has been performed since the composer’s centenary celebrations in 1973, the majority of Rachmaninoff’s output remains relatively little heard, and some of it is extremely hard to come by. Why? Is it still held that, as has been erroneously claimed in the past, much of this music is flawed? That is certainly not the opinion of the internationally acclaimed performers who love his compositions so profoundly.

Conductor Sir Antonio Pappano offers what I believe is a most convincing analysis: ‘I think the danger with Rachmaninoff’s music is the same danger that faces Puccini’s music. When you have someone who is so gifted melodically, I think it’s a trap into which a composer falls: the famous tune in the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s 2^nd Piano Concerto is like a narcotic that became very, very successful, and all of a sudden there’s a success that sets the composer in a direction that maybe the audience wants him to go but where he doesn’t really want to go’.

Indeed, the popularity of the 2^nd Piano Concerto is not reflected in the relatively infrequently played 4^th Piano Concerto – a considerably more harmonically audacious and less directly melodic work that sometimes has a kind of mercurial unpredictability that we hear in many of Rachmaninoff’s rarer performed compositions.

‘In the 4^th Piano Concerto’, continues Sir Antonio, ‘somehow it is this restless nature that interests him, moving from harmony to harmony and texture to texture, and the diabolical in music. I think he was a composer who was a little bit a prisoner of his own success, and when his later works were not as successful, I think it was very difficult for him.

The 4^th Piano Concerto received a scathing reception at its premiere in Philadelphia on the 18^th of March 1927. Only after the composer had revised it twice did it gain its deserved recognition as a masterpiece in its own right. Its unpopularity compared with the 2^nd and 3^rd Piano Concertos was indeed a source of unhappiness to Rachmaninoff, especially as it is such an inventively original composition. Ironically, in the same concert the simultaneous world premiere of the Three Russian Folk Songs for Chorus and Orchestra was greeted enthusiastically, but the work soon became even more of a rarity than the 4^th Piano Concerto and these magnetically evocative songs are seldom performed.

Pull quote: ‘Rachmaninoff was a truly great song writer, and what he did for voice and piano is a tremendous achievement.’

Rachmaninoff scholar and author Professor Philip Bullock, the editor of the recently published book Rachmaninoff and His World, offers his explanation: ‘They only last around 15 minutes or so in total and require very large forces, so promoters and programmers avoid committing heavy resources for such a short piece. That is so unfortunate because this work is a spicy and colourful composition that’s full of declamation reminiscent of Mussorgsky, tangy orchestration, and in the third movement – a racy and saucy song – very naughty lyrics. This is not some sanitised, pious vision of Russian culture, and it also is not ethnographic folklore.

‘Rachmaninoff had heard Russian folksongs in Moscow cabarets and cafes, often with Gypsy singers, and that was really a kind of commercialised ersatz folk music. A lot of people are squeamish about it, but Rachmaninoff loved it, and the third song was inspired by one of these singers, Nadezhda Plevitskaya, whom he had met during his exile in New York in 1926. There’s a recording of him accompanying her on the piano in the song that he subsequently adapted for the third of the Russian folksongs, and her voice is wild and eccentric and full of whoops and slides – altogether very impolite! People might think of Rachmaninoff in emigration as nostalgic – he had stopped composing, so the story goes, because he had lost his homeland and he missed Russia, and that’s partly true – but in these three folksongs, creativity comes back with extraordinary vividness and freshness. Perhaps there’s a sense of loss and nostalgia, but for me this music really exudes an impression of strong creative renewal.’     

Well, it can at least be heard in Decca’s Complete Works set. Extracts from that set, including the Three Russian Folk Songs, feature in a series of 20 podcasts that have been made for the websites of Decca Classics, the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation, and the WFMT Radio Network as a collaborative production commemorating Rachmaninoff at the 150^th anniversary of his birth. Speaking in the podcasts are a large number of highly distinguished performers and scholars, including Sir Antonio Pappano, who comments on Rachmaninoff’s more than seven dozen songs: ‘Rachmaninoff was a truly great song writer, and what he did for voice and piano is a tremendous achievement. They are very difficult to sing – for a soprano performing them she has to have a wonderful high B flat, often in piano, and she must be able to sustain phrases that are akin to the more difficult songs of Strauss. Rachmaninoff’s songs invoke a culture of singing that is no doubt operatic and certainly influenced by Tchaikovsky and all that went before – but there’s almost a greater satisfaction because the harmonies pierce you. There’s something that speaks so directly.’

Some of Rachmaninoff’s most experimentally innovative music is heard in the ingenious set of 6 songs Opus 38 from 1916, setting poetry of contemporary symbolist writers. It is hard to believe that they are Rachmaninoff’s compositions, so impressionistically do their harmonies and melodies float and drift intangibly across the musical landscape. The last of them, A-oo, is maybe the most remarkably original of all and will take the centre spotlight in one of several major new performing and educational initiatives that the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation is presenting at the Senar Cultural and Educational Centre.

The Foundation oversees the operations of the Centre, which opens this year at Villa Senar, the idyllic home that Sergei Rachmaninoff and his wife Natalya built by the shores of Lake Lucerne between 1931 and 1933 (the name Senar was derived from the first two letters of their first names, plus ‘r’ for Rachmaninoff).  With its beautiful park and rose garden and its glorious view over the lake, it reminded them in a way of some of the spirit of their beloved Ivanovka estate that they had lost when they had left Russia in 1917.Villa Senar in 1934 

Senar is now owned by the Canton of Lucerne, and the Rachmaninoff Foundation, under the expert leadership of its highly imaginative and resourceful managing director Andrea Loetscher, is making it a house of culture and education where the composer’s legacy is accessible in the context of new performances, masterclasses, talks and other events. Many of Rachmaninoff’s rare – and popular – great works will be celebrated at the centre as part of the Foundation’s programme of commemorative events during this 150^th anniversary of the composer’s birth. Hopefully as more and more people experience the rarities there will in future be increasingly less scarcities: like almost everything that Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote, they are full of originality, magic, and his inspired creative genius.