I-Tunes:
At present we are being overrun by a multitude of pianists that obviously seem to have a one track mind: “impress the public by their speed, strength and accuracy.” For them, technique is the objective. Very sad indeed!
It is therefore refreshing and a genuine pleasure to listen to Tatiana Pavlova, a pianist of the romantic school, who plays Rachmaninoff with love and devotion, using her technique as a means, a basic element, in order to be able to play effortlessly the music and fully concentrate on its structure, meaning and beauty.
She has a lovely tone, imagination, is metrically flexible and I do believe that Rachmaninoff would have been pleased by her performance.
Prince Tibor Yusti von Arth
(Rachmaninoff’s only pupil)
Details:
Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff was born on an old rural estate in the Russian province of Novgorod in 1873. He studied in St. Petersburg and Moscow where he graduated with a gold medal at the conservatoire presenting his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra and his opera Aleko (1891-2) for his final exams. Tchaikovsky was very impressed by the young musician, and before his death in 1893, he encouraged him to continue composing. After the negative reception of his Symphony No. 1, which was performed for the first time in St Petersburg in 1897, Rachmaninoff fell into a deep depression from which he emerged only three years later with the success of his Concerto No. 2 and other important musical works. His excellent musical background and eclectic talents soon revealed his qualities as a pianist and conductor. His piano career began with a tour of Russia in 1893 and he began playing abroad in London in 1899 and in the United States in 1909. During his career as a conductor, which began in 1897, he made a particular mark for himself at the Bolshoi Theatre (1904) and the Imperial Opera Theatre of St. Petersburg (1912). He also conducted other well-known symphonic orchestras (such as those of Boston and Philadelphia). His friendships with Chaliapin and Chekhov began in 1898 and 1900 respectively. Just after Scriabin’s death in 1915, Rachmaninoff performed a series of concerts of his music in Russia in his memory. Rachmaninoff left Russia after the October Revolution. His departure, which is almost prophesised in his music, was to be permanent and a source of never-ending suffering which only increased his vein of melancholy and introspection. The fact that most of his works were written before 1917 can be attributed, on the one hand, to this severance from the source of inspiration that his country was for him, and on the other, of course, to his intense and dazzlingly successful career as a concert pianist in Europe and the United States which began after 1918. As a result, he finally achieved an extraordinary fame and reputation as a great pianist and established professional relationships with other great musicians of the time, (such as Mahler, who conducted Concerto No. 3 with Rachmaninoff on piano, Stokowski, Ormandy, Horowitz and Kreisler, with whom he formed a chamber music duo). He died in California in 1943.
When he gave his final painful farewell to his mother country, Rachmaninoff could have hardly realised that years later, in 1941, the Nazi invasion of the Soviet territory would impel him to send a generous contribution in the form of money, medicine and radiological equipment to the Red army accompanied by a message with the simple words: “From a Russian […] for the Russian people at war […] Sergei Rachmaninoff”, in spite of the fact that his family house in Ivanovka, in which
he had written much of his music was looted and burnt just after the beginning of the civil war.
His constant veneration for his native land and its unconquerable people is an ever-present factor in his works which are marked by such characteristics and symbols as: contrasting and contradictory diversities, the all-pervading presence of Russian-European culture, allusions to the Asiatic incursion and its tradition; the outburst of exasperated feelings, happiness, sadness, nostalgia, tenderness, barbarity, heroism, pessimism, bitterness, resignation, fatalism, obscurantism; mysticism and deep faith, Orthodox Russian ritual and its icons and hymns, the wonderful angelic choirs and majestic monasteries, the shapes, colours and coatings of the church bulbs, gold and the myriad of precious stones, the incessant ringing of bells from the tiniest to the hugest; the humble people, the gipsies; the villages and fairs; the colour, variety and decoration of popular costumes; the songs and dances; the troikas and sleigh bells; winter, the howling wind, snow and the mystery of the night; the fir-trees, the immense forests, the silence and smells; the twittering birds and cawing crows; the lakes, ponds and wide overflowing rivers; the mono and multicoloured plains; the whistling sounds, far-away cries, and seagulls drawing large circles as they glide in the immensity of the sky…
All this is evoked in most of Rachmaninoff’s music; or, to put it another way, may be imagined if one listens to it with the appropriate spirit. His other works are based on Russian and non-Russian literary and artistic suggestions.
Rachmaninoff’s musical productions cover almost all genres and represent a wide range of vocal and instrumental achievements. They include 45 numbers of opuses and a group of non-numbered works which were almost all written before 1917 (when he wrote Op.39), that is, before the composer was 34, six of them having been composed afterwards. The following is a résumé of his most important works:
- solo piano: 2 sets of various pieces, 6 Musical moments, 23 Preludes, 2 sonatas, 17 Etudes-Tableaux, 2 sets of variations;
- 4 hand piano: 6 duets;
- 2 hand piano: 2 suites;
- chamber music: Sonata for Violoncello and Piano; 2 elegiac trios;
- orchestra: 4 Piano Concertos, Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini; 3 symphonies; symphonic poems, among which The Isle of the Dead and Symphonic Dances;
- voice and piano: more than 80 songs (taken mainly from Russian poems);
- chorus, soloists and orchestras: the cantata Spring; The Bells (from the Russian translation of E. A. Poe’s poem) and Three Popular Russian Songs;
- operas: Aleko; The Miserly Knight; Francesca da Rimini;
- choir a cappella: The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom and Vespers.
A considerable number of Rachmaninoff’s works are still not widely known in the West, such as the First Piano Sonata, for example, or the trios, songs and his vocal music in general.
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a master of the art of composition. He never drifted from his original concept of the natural evolution of his musical style and was never tempted to follow the musical trends that were emerging at the beginning of the century. Although his style derived in general from Tchaikovsky, it was never an imitation. On the contrary, Rachmaninoff’s music is a blend of very personal characteristics which make it immediately recognisable, such as the intrinsically Russian character of his powerful emotional expressions and magnificent sonorities; the nobility and subtlety of some of his more sombre, lyrical inspirations; the powerful stream of his long melodies; the skilful exchanges of his internal voices; his great and incisive rhythmic vitality; the rich, refined and personal texture of his splendid harmonies (the myriads of precious stones), sustained, when the case calls for it, by a magisterial and sumptuous orchestration (as the great Russian tradition of the Nineteenth century was); his typical ornamentation defined by a multitude of sounds, of sparkling dizzy designs (for example on the high notes of the piano). The powerful sense of the theatre and environment in his scenic music. The
intense spirituality of his vocal religious conceptions which he inherited from orthodox hymns.
Rachmaninoff, who had a total mastery of the piano, (which was the most appropriate means of expression for his great creativity), innovated its numerous technical aspects and explored all of its sound and percussive potential through the virtuosity and perfection of his down-writing.
The composition of 2 sets of 17 Etudes-Tableaux, Op. 33 and Op. 39 date from 1911 and 1916-17 respectively. After the composer corrected the order and numeration of the pieces that make up Op. 39, they came to a total of 9. This is the last work for solo piano that Rachmaninoff composed in Russia. He himself performed it in Petrograd in 1917. This is not only a peak moment of his piano works, full of technical difficulties and play of contrasts, colours and textures (which justifies the title “Studies”), but also of non-descriptive pieces which are full of dramatic tension. The second element in the title (“Tableaux”) derives from suggestions taken from paintings (such as The Isle of the Dead by A. Böcklin). When the Italian composer O. Respighi received Rachmaninoff’s permission to orchestrate some of these pieces in 1930 (numbers 2, 6, 7 and 9 of Op. 39 to be precise), the latter revealed to him the images that had inspired him and which he had previously never intended to allude to – the sea and the seagulls, Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf, funeral march and oriental march. These studies offer a total exploration of the piano. Numbers 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6, - the incredible central section – 8 and 9 are particularly elaborate, difficult, flying and fiery; No. 2 is meditative, whilst the solemnity of No. 7 is underlined by the sound of death knells and a specific harmony.
Musical Moments, Op. 16, was written in 1896. Some of these pieces (numbers 1,4 and 5) have a slight touch of Chopin in their sad, agitated and calm moods. The composer’s individual trait and origins are reconfirmed in the delicate anxiety
of No. 2, as well as in the choral and elegiac structure of No. 3 and the very difficult and imposing No. 6.
Lilacs and Daisies are the composer’s transcriptions for solo piano and are taken from his extensive series of songs; Op. 21 No. 5 (1900) and Op. 38 No. 3 (1915). The texts, which are by contemporary Russian poets, describe how feelings can be reawakened by a contemplation of the beauty of flowers; the part of piano accompaniment complements the meaning of these poems and happily evokes their atmospheres. These transcriptions remain full of the freshness, beauty and even the fragrance suggested by the flowers.
Rachmaninoff poured into the piano an infinity of musical ideas in his sonatas Op. 28 and Op. 36 (the latter written in 1913 and revised in 1931). Although these works are well organised they leave the listener and the interpreter breathless. They are complex, replete with technical difficulties, “sculptured in granite” and display a monumental quality which, in this sense, reflects the style of Liszt’s Sonata. Almost all of the first, Op. 28, was written in Dresden in 1907, and performed for the first time in October of the same year in Moscow by the pianist Konstantin Igumnov. It is a difficult and long piece (about 45 minutes) which may be the reason why it has been rarely played or recorded. It reveals superb sonorities, magnitudes of vast melodies, dark harmonies and a very personal piano style that is full of anguish and passion. Regarding the reasons for the three movements, the composer wrote in a letter to his old school friend, Nikita Morozov, that he had conceived them in terms of “three opposed elements”, for which he had been inspired by Goethe’s Faust (though the latter work is never explicitly quoted), these being; Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles (the idea was also close to Liszt’s aesthetics). From the beginning, a brief interval motif (5a) runs through the work which is subject to various transformations. The thematic material that is present in the two initial movements - the first tormented and restless, the second melancholic
and intensely beautiful - reappears in the riotous finale to confer a sense of unity to the whole work.
Ref.: NUM 1125 [Cd Duplo]
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