Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2

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Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 Program Notes

Like  many  of  the  major  Russian  composers,  Rachmaninoff  was  to  the  manor  born.dzIn  his  case,  it  was  a  quiet  area  of  the  Novgorod  Oblast  (where  the  main  industry  remains  timber),  close  to  the  midway  point  of  the  450-mile  journey  between  Moscow  and  St.  Petersburg.    Family  life  was  complicated  –  under  his  father’s  management,  the  estate  was  severely  diminished.      After  studying  music  from  age  10  in  St.  Petersburg,  he  seems  to  have  had  some  academic  problems  as  a  teenager.  A  move  to  Moscow  proved  beneficial,  and  he  excelled  as  both  pianist  and  composer.  His  teachers  included  Anton  Arensky,  Sergei  Taniev,  and  the  incredibly  strict  Nikolai  Zverev.  In  1892,  Rachmaninoff’s  Moscow  Conservatory  graduation- piece,  the  opera  Aleko,  received  praise  by  many,  including  Tchaikovsky.  It  was  soon  produced  at  the  Bolshoi  Theater  in  Moscow.    The  unfortunate  premiere  of  his  First  Symphony  1897,  (the  program  may  have  been  too  long,  or  the  conductor  was  not  up  to  the  piece)  leda  traumatized  Rachmaninoff  to  cease  composition.  Meetings  with  hypnotherapist  Dr.  Nikolai  Dahl  in  1900  were  more  than  encouraging:  his  wildly  popular  Second  Piano  Concerto  was  soon  completed.    In  the  meantime,  he’d  developed  an  additional  career  as  a  conductor,  which  led  to  two  years  conducting  at  Moscow’s  Bolshoi  (1904-06).  In  1905,  seeking  refuge  from  the  augurs  of  what  would  be  the  bloody  1917  revolution,  Rachmaninoff  moved  his  young  family  to  Dresden,  where  he  composed  his  Second  Symphony.    It’s  a  sweeping  work  –  without  Ormandy  and  Rachmaninoff’s  collaboration  in  what  are  called  the  Philadelphia  Orchestra  cuts,  which  reduce  the  work  to  47  minutes,  it  is  an  hour  long.    It  has  beautiful  and  tuneful  melodies,  which  and  music  that  is  dramatic  and  also  the  height  of  Russian  romanticism.  While  it  is  certainly  not  programmatic,  it  contains  musical  touchstones  Rachmaninoff  must  have  found  important  –  some  of  them  occur  in  other  works.    it  evokes  Russian  Orthodox  chants,  while  containing  echoes  of  the  Latin  Requiem  Dies  Irae  chant  (familiar  also  in  Berlioz’s  Symphonie  fantastique).    In  rehearsal,  we’ve  observed  possible  references  to  Wagner’s  opera  Tristan  &  Isolde  through  melodic  fragments  from  the  Prelude,  and  an  English  horn  solo  that  transitions  to  the  melancholic  Allegro.    The  second  movement  is  a  scherzo  on  a  grand  scale,  and  its  sweeping  second  theme  was  used  with  great  effect  in  the  2014  Academy  Awards  Best  Picture  winner,  Birdman.    The  scherzo  form  is  interrupted,  though,  by  a  tremendously  energetic  fugue,  a  skill  he  would  have  studied  in  Moscow  with  Taniev,  the  symphony’s  dedicatee.  The  symphony’s  third  movement  is  an  intimate  and  romantic  slow  movement,  sometimes  supporting  beautiful  solos  in  the  clarinet,  violin  and  horn.    In  1976,  pop  artist  Eric  Carmen  borrowed  its  simple  yet  memorable  melody  for  his  song Never  Gonna  Fall  in  Love  Again. Alternating  between  rambunctious  and  swooning,  the  15-minute  finale  is  a  rousing  end  to  this  amazing  piece  of  music.  After  emigrating  to  the  United  States  in  1918,  Rachmaninoff  spent  most  of  the  rest  of  his  life  in  his  adopted  homeland,  where  he  was acclaimed  as  a  piano  soloist  and  conductor  (and  often  too  busy  to  compose).    He  toured  the  USA  widely,  although  summered  in  Switzerland,  and  composed  at  his  estate  in  Long  Island  on  occasion.    He  frequently  visited  Philadelphia  as  a  guest  of  the  Philadelphia  Orchestra,  to  whom  he  dedicated  his  last  work,  the  Symphonic  Dances  (premiered  at  the  Academy of  Music  in  1941).

Born: April 1, 1873, Starorussky Uyezd
Died: March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills, CA

Categories: Program Notes