Sergei Rachmaninov: one of the piano greats

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Transcript:
Sergei Rachmaninov, who was born in 1873, was once described by his fellow composer Stravinsky as a six-and-a-half-foot scowl; as he towered over his colleagues, he always did seem a little grumpy. And the Russian composer’s music does have a brooding, gloomy quality – it’s deeply Romantic and very Russian.

As a young man, though, Rachmaninov was first and foremost a pianist, today still regarded as the greatest pianist of the recording age. But the young man was also obsessed with composing, and once he’d graduated from the Moscow Conservatoire – with honours, of course – he set about producing works of startling melodic and harmonic richness. But his path to composing greatness wasn’t so smooth, thanks to the disastrous premiere of his First Symphony, given a terrible performance under a drunk conductor, and a critical pasting. It took Rachmaninov three years to get over the disappointment, not to mention the depression he sunk into. During those three years, he composed almost nothing, but several hypnotherapy sessions later, his confidence was restored, and in 1901 he set to work almost immediately on the magnificent Second Piano Concerto, the work which single-handedly made his name – and it’s still his most famous.

Like most of his piano works, the concerto makes massive demands on the soloist – Rachmaninov’s hands were the largest of any concert pianist living then and since, which meant he could play enormous chords and whirlwind passages that would be completely beyond most other pianists. But it’s those huge chords that give Rachmaninov’s music its big, full-bodied opulence.

Only a few years after the premiere of the Second Piano Concerto, Russia was beginning to show signs of social breakdown, and Rachmaninov spent more and more time away, touring in Europe and America, until the 1917 revolution persuaded him to leave Russia for good. He settled in the States, where he wrote, among other works, his Third Piano Concerto, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and the Symphonic Dances. And if all these works have a stronger Russian flavour than much of his previous work, that’s no coincidence – Rachmaninov missed Russia desperately. Even his house in Beverly Hills was an exact replica of his Moscow home.

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