This Program Note Originally Appeared in the Philadelphia Orchestra: the Centennial Collection (Historic Broadcasts and Recordings from 1917-1998)
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This program note originally appeared in The Philadelphia Orchestra: The Centennial Collection (Historic Broadcasts and Recordings from 1917-1998). THE ISLE OF THE DEAD, OP. 29 COMPOSED IN 1909 SERGEI RACHMANINOFF BORN IN SEMYONOVO, RUSSIA, APRIL 1, 1873 DIED IN BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA, MARCH 28, 1943 The composer with whom The Philadelphia Orchestra enjoyed its warmest association was Sergei Rachmaninoff, who repeatedly referred to it as “my favorite orchestra,” and even “the greatest in the world.” He had first encountered The Philadelphia Orchestra on his tour of the United States in 1909. After giving his first American orchestral performance at the Academy of Music playing his Second Piano Concerto—but with the visiting Boston Symphony under Max Fiedler—Rachmaninoff made his American conducting debut at the Academy a few weeks later. This time he led the Philadelphians, in a program featuring Musorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain and his own Second Symphony. Carl Pohlig was the Orchestra’s music director at that time. However it was Leopold Stokowski who subsequently established the close bond. In 1920, after the composer’s flight from Revolutionary Russia, Stokowski mounted an all-Rachmaninoff gala in Philadelphia, accompanying him in his Third Concerto and presenting the U.S. premiere of his symphonic cantata The Bells. Rachmaninoff fell completely under the spell of the Philadelphia Sound, which was ideally suited to the ripe instrumental saturation of his music. Between 1927 and 1941, the Orchestra gave the world premieres of five more Rachmaninoff works, including the familiar Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the Third Symphony, and the Symphonic Dances, which the composer dedicated to Ormandy and the Philadelphians. In addition the Orchestra gave the posthumous world premiere of Act I of Rachmaninoff’s opera Monna Vanna in Saratoga in 1984. Rachmaninoff had first seen the haunting Die Toteninsel by the Swiss Romantic painter Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901) while visiting Leipzig in 1906. The painting shows a stark island of rock beneath a sunless sky; toward this melancholy place a boat bearing a coffin glides across the dark, silent water. Yet Rachmaninoff didn’t see the painting until after he had composed his Isle of the Dead. In fact his inspiration had been a black-and- white sketch by the artist, which he later maintained he preferred to the color version. In any case Böcklin’s lonely imagery struck a chord. Rachmaninoff composed the music between April and May 1909, and conducted the first performance in Moscow two years later, and within a year he conducted several performances with orchestras in America. Stokowski conducted the first Philadelphia Orchestra performance in 1913, and the composer himself led the Orchestra in the first recording of the work, for Victor in 1929. The music is less narrative than evocative of a general mood, though Rachmaninoff indulges in descriptive tone painting throughout—for example the suggestion, at the opening, of lapping water against the island’s sheer cliffs. We hear a lament for horn, taken up by the oboe. This is expanded into a brass chorale, making clear what was only hinted at earlier: Dies irae, the ancient plainchant for the dead. The middle section is one of Rachmaninoff’s great slow movements, the strings reaching an emotional peak as they transform the lament into an arc of soaring lyricism—an impassioned episode that achieves indescribable poignancy in this performance under Ormandy’s baton. The ecstatic spell is broken by rapid gestures of menace, leading to the concluding section in which the relentless Dies irae underlies a series of thematic reminiscences, until nothing is left but the murmuring water. Even that is stilled in the end, as life departs in eternal darkness. Though Ormandy re-recorded much of his Rachmaninoff repertoire after the advent of stereo, he recorded The Isle of the Dead only once, in mono for Columbia, in 1954. The present 1977 performance was received glowingly by the press. The tone poem “catches the best of the Orchestra’s style,” wrote Daniel Webster (The Philadelphia Inquirer). “For Ormandy, Rachmaninoff’s grand romantic gestures, the lyrical outpourings are natural and fresh.” James Felton (The Bulletin) was equally moved, praising Ormandy’s “unshakable and almost effortless assurance,” and writing that “Rachmaninoff’s music remains a slowly gathering piece of great lyrical beauty with long singing lines that can be spellbinding. … It emerged flawless in this … technicolored and unabashedly lush performance.” —Barrymore Laurence Scherer Program note © 1999. All rights reserved. Program note may not be reprinted without written permission from The Philadelphia Orchestra Association. .