Concertos from Germany, Hungary, and Russia
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In Co n C e r t • Vo l u m e 2 ‘Co n C e r t o s ’ SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor Op. 30 1 Allegro ma non tanto ............................................................ 15:43 2 Intermezzo ............................................................................ 10:09 3 Finale (Ala breve) ................................................................. 13:38 CARL MARIA VON WEBER 4 Konzertstück, Op. 79 ............................................................ 15:43 FRANZ LISZT 5 Hungarian Fantasy, S. 123 ................................................... 15:00 Total Time: 70:33 - 2 - The three pieces presented on this CD were written by composers whose lives together span the entire length of the Romantic period, beginning with Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826), who flourished at the outset of the era, continuing with Franz Liszt (1811-1886) who was born fifteen years before Weber died, and ending with Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) who was born thirteen years before Liszt died, and whose work constitutes the last flower of Russian Romanticism. All three composers were also extraordinary pianists, equipping them the better to compose idiomatically for the instrument and exploit its most extreme subtleties. Each had very large hands as well. Moreover, all three composed their piano works for their own use on stage, and all three were conductors. Through their overlapping years, and their influence upon each other, we thus have a representative span outlining the great period of Romantic piano concertos from Germany, Hungary, and Russia. The three pieces in question, composed in 1821, 1852, and 1909, in vastly different styles, amply display the range of writing that we know as Romantic and give us a fair sampling of the Romantic piano and its orchestra. RACHMANINOFF: PI a n o Co n C e r t o no. 3 I n D m I n o r , oP. 30 Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), the great Russian Romantic, was born in the town of Oneg, near St. Petersburg. Both of his parents were pianists. In his - 3 - early years he studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, impressing his teachers by his musical acumen, and playing recitals for musical and social celebrities. Later on, at the Moscow Conservatory, he studied piano with Alexander Siloti, his cousin, who had been a pupil of Franz Liszt in Weimar from 1883 to 1886. Rachmaninoff subsequently studied with the autocratic pedagogue Nikolai Zverev in his highly disciplined home. He studied composition with the pianist, conductor, and composer Anton Arensky, and with Alexander Taneyev he studied counterpoint and fugue. Only fragments exist of a Piano Concerto in C minor that Rachmaninoff wrote in 1889. In 1891, as a seventeen-year old student, he composed his Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1, revising it in 1917. In 1900 he wrote the highly successful Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, after undergoing neuropsychotherapy for the depression that crippled him following the failure of his first symphony. In 1909 he composed thePiano Concerto No. 3, which we hear on this recording, and in the same year he composed his fourth and last piano concerto, op. 40, a less successful work, which he revised in 1941. In addition to the four concertos, he wrote another work for piano and orchestra, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The second and third concertos are among the most popular of his works. As is often the case with beloved classical works, they have become popularly known, if partially so, through film. Earlier Russian piano concertos had been written by Anton Rubinstein, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Anton Arensky. But Rachmaninoff was originally influenced less by these Russian titans of the piano than by the Piano Concerto - 4 - in A minor of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg. It’s “Lisztian rhetoric and elements of its formal design left their mark” (Barrie Martyn) on Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1. In 1909 Rachmaninoff accepted a lucrative offer for an American tour– enabling him to purchase a large car, which he had long wanted to do–for which he composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30, writing the majority of it at his rural villa in Ivanovka and completing it late in September. Although the composition of the work went quite rapidly, he wrote that “I’m perpetually dissatisfied with myself. Nothing but continuous torture,” and that he was working “like a man doing hard labor” to finish the concerto. He went to the United States by ship and practiced the work on a dummy piano, playing the first performance with the New York Symphony Society (now defunct) under the baton of Walter Damrosch on November 28 at the New Theatre (later renamed the Century Theatre–once described as “New York’s most spectacularly unsuccessful theater”). In January he repeated the work with the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Gustav Mahler. Rachmaninoff was so impressed by Mahler’s handling of the difficult score that he compared him to Arthur Nikisch as the greatest conductor of his day. He recorded the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. The main theme in the concerto’s first movement, Allegro ma non tanto (D minor), is staunchly Russian and disarmingly simple. Rachmaninoff commented that it “was borrowed neither from folk song forms nor from church sources. It simply wrote itself!… If I had any plan in composing this theme, I was thinking - 5 - only of sound. I wanted ‘to sing’ the melody on the piano as a singer would sing it, and to find a suitable orchestral accompaniment or one that would not muffle this ‘singing.’” The theme appears in understated parallel octaves in the piano, both at the outset and elsewhere in the work, belying its capacity to generate such a dramatic, large-scaled work. The movement contains a cadenza, for which Rachmaninoff provided two versions, one that is dark and powerful, and the other that has a livelier and lighter toccata-like character. In his own recording of the work, the composer used and preferred the second version, as does Mr. Wild. The second movement, titled Intermezzo (Adagio), in F-sharp minor/D-flat major, with its lush first theme that is alternately anguished, ecstatic and scherzo-like, presents a series of variations and serves as an interlude between the closely related outer movements. The second theme is in a contrasting major mode. After its recapitulation we hear the return of the theme from the first movement. A cadenza leads directly into the triumphant third movement, which is titled Finale (Alla breve)–in D minor/D major–and draws on themes from the first movement. Barrie Martyn observes that in the Finale there is gypsy influence–with its “wild abandonment and excitement”–where it is more subtle and discreet than we hear in its untamed state in Concerto No. 1. The work overall has a finely wrought structural ingenuity, due in part to its cyclical character. Indeed, “Rachmaninoff illustrates to perfection his considerable gift for writing long beautifully phrased melodies, and uses his material intelligently to create three unified movements with a wide diversity of - 6 - mood” (Geoffrey Norris). It is “superior in flow and continuity to Concerto No. 2, more sophisticated compositionally and of greater rhythmic variety” (Max Harrison). It is truly a magnificent work, although a reviewer from the New York Sun, hearing the first performance, wrote that it was “sound, reasonable music... though not a great nor memorable proclamation.... The concerto was too long and lacked rhythmic and harmonic contrast between the first movement and the rest.” Some pundits called it a “half-an-hour of padding,” “genteel vulgarity,” “definitely not highly distinguished music.” Others made the absurd claim that it was merely a rewriting of the second piano concerto. Eric Blom wrote: “The third pianoforte Concerto was on the whole liked by the public only because of its close resemblance to the second...” Rachmaninoff did authorize several cuts in the work and preferred to perform it with his suggested cuts. For the first fifty years of its life, the cuts were generally observed in performance, but today it is usually played complete. In this recording by Earl Wild we hear the work in its entirety. The third concerto is a favorite of performers in piano competitions who use it as a display vehicle–because of the virtuosic demands it places on the performer. But pianists who fail to penetrate the symphonic depth of the work do it a considerable disservice. Indeed it is among the most difficult concertos of the standard piano repertoire, giving pianists cause not only to revere it, but to fear it. Pianist Jósef Hofmann, the dedicatee of the work, never performed it, and Gary Graffman lamented he had not learned it as a student, when he was - 7 - “still too young to know fear.” In this remarkable recording Mr. Wild exploits its musical scope to a richly intelligent degree. As a pianist, Rachmaninoff had exceedingly large hands and a prodigious musical memory, not to mention a truly phenomenal keyboard technique. He played with clarity and definition, his rhythms precise and his legato elegant. In addition to his own works and the standard nineteenth-century repertoire, he performed works by Beethoven, Borodin, Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, and Weber. Exiled to the United States after the Russian Revolution, Rachmaninoff lived in Beverly Hills, California until his death by cancer in the spring of 1943. WEBER: Ko n z e r t s t ü ck , oP. 79 Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) was born in Eutin, near Lübeck in northern Germany, and died at age 39 in London, of tuberculosis. In his early years he traveled with his father’s theatrical company and assumed several appointments.