This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ The Changing Style of Playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Music Chiao, Yuanpu Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. 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The Changing Style of Playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Music Yuan-Pu Chiao King’s College, University of London Accepted for the Degree of PhD, June 2012 1 Abstract Rachmaninoff was not only a fine composer but also an extraordinary pianist. Due to his virtuosity, he established a powerful interpretative style for his music that clearly influenced his contemporaries. However, the way people have performed his piano music has changed over the years. In this thesis, I show how the recorded interpretations of some important figures have become 'authoritative renditions' for other pianists to follow and argue that these have caused performance fashions to change in specific areas and periods. From time to time, pianists have also reacted against existing norms. In the last two decades, fashions seem to have altered again: many pianists are now starting to return to an 'authentic' Rachmaninoff style in their performances. Since a performance takes place in a historical and cultural context, it is necessary to trace the context behind the sound. The thesis starts by discussing the meaning of performing schools (Chapter One), and the characteristics of the early Russian Piano School to which Rachmaninoff belonged (Chapter Two). Chapter Three focuses on Rachmaninoff’s own performance style. Examining the characteristics of his playing, I use the features of the early Russian Piano School to examine the extent to which Rachmaninoff’s performances were characteristic of the Russian tradition. Chapter Four discusses how pianists have played Rachmaninoff’s solo pieces over time, and Chapter Five how pianists have developed their editorial approaches and structural ideas when playing the composer’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 3. While Chapter Four underlines the changing fashions across generations, the two case studies in Chapter Five suggest that recordings may have played a more significant role in this change than the score. In Chapter Six, I go back to the question of being ‘authentic’ and summarise different perspectives from my interviews with pianists, to see how they view these issues. I conclude the thesis with suggestions for further study. 2 Acknowledgements First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, for guiding me through this research; he always had patience and kindness for me and knew how to keep me going, especially when I was experiencing some more troublesome moments in my life. Without his support and understanding I would never have completed the project. I am also grateful to everyone else in the King’s music department, past and present, and my friends and colleagues at CHARM. I cannot thank enough Miriam Quick and Amy Blier-Carruthers. I not only had a great time with them at the seminars held by Prof. Leech-Wilkinson, but also learned a lot from their knowledge and experience. I will never forget Miriam’s kindest help with proofreading the thesis. I would also like to thank Jonathan Summers, Timothy Day, Robert Keeley, and Andrew Hallifax for their help and suggestions. I gratefully acknowledge the support I have received from the British Library Sound Archive / The Edison Fellowship as well as from King’s College via the Humanities Research Award and Overseas Studentship. This research would have been equally impossible without those who most kindly agreed to be interviewed by me. Special thanks to Stephen Hough, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Bella Davidovich, Dang Thai Son, Nelson Freire, Rustem Hayroudinoff, and Krystian Zimerman for helping me to understand the Russian Piano School and Rachmaninoff’s performing style more deeply. Also, special thanks to Simon Trezise, Nancy Shawcross, and John Pollack for helping me to listen to Rachmaninoff’s unpublished recording at the Ormandy Archive, University of Pennsylvania. And heartfelt thanks to Ying-Che Chen’s help for the formatting. Finally, I thank my family for their support: without them, I would never have got this far. 3 Table of Contents Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 3 Table of Contents 4 Table of Sonic Visualiser Diagrams 5 Table of Score Examples 7 Table of Tables 10 Table of Audio Examples 12 Introduction: Why Rachmaninoff? 13 Chapter 1: The Meaning of the Performing School 22 Chapter 2: The Early Russian Piano School 57 Chapter 3: Rachmaninoff’s Performing Style at the Keyboard 134 Chapter 4: Playing Rachmaninoff’s Solo Piano Music, a Case Study of the Prelude in G minor, Op.23 No.5 220 Chapter 5: The Influence of Recording and the ‘Authoritative Rendition’— How Different Generations of Pianists Have Played Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concertos No.2 and No.3 285 Chapter 6: Themes, Reflections and Suggestions for further Studies 352 Appendix 391 Discography of the Case Studies 4 39 Bibliography 45 7 4 Table of Sonic Visualiser Diagrams SV 2-1-1 Debussy: Prelude Das pas sur la neige (played by Marcelle Meyer) 88 SV 2-1-2 Debussy: Prelude Das pas sur la neige (played by Maria Grinberg) 88 SV 2-1-3 played by Neuhaus 91 SV 2-1-4 played by Grinberg 91 SV 2-1-5 played by Barere 91 SV 2-1-6 played by Oborin 91 SV 2-1-7 played by Richter 91 SV 2-1-8 played by Nikolayeva 91 SV 2-1-9 played by Gilels 91 SV 2-1-10 played by Ashkenazy 91 SV 2-1-11 played by Arrau 93 SV 2-1-12 played by Horszowski 93 SV 2-1-13 played by Ney 93 SV 2-1-14 played by Serkin 93 SV 2-1-15 played by Fischer 93 SV 2-1-16 played by Gieseking 93 SV 2-1-17 played by Fischer 93 SV 2-1-18 played by Kempff 93 SV 2-2-1: Gilels’s performance, seen in Sonic Visualiser 104 SV 2-2-2: Ashkenazy 105 SV 2-2-3: Flier 105 SV 2-2-4: Vedernikov 106 SV 2-2-5: Hofmann 107 SV 2-2-6: Gieseking 107 SV 2-2-7: Fevrier 108 SV 2-2-8: Haas 108 SV 2-2-9: Lympany 109 SV 2-2-10: François 109 SV 2-2-11: Weissenberg 110 SV 2-2-12: Demus 110 SV 2-2-13: Fleisher 111 SV 2-2-14: Moravec 111 SV 2-2-15: Van Cliburn 112 SV 2-3-1: Serkin 113 SV 2-3-2: Brendel 113 SV 2-3-3: Yudina 114 5 SV 2-3-4: Sofronitsky 114 SV 2-3-5: Horowitz (1953) 115 SV 2-3-6: Horowitz (1987) 115 SV 2-3-7: Berman 116 SV 2-3-8: Ashkenazy 116 SV 2-4: Horowitz plays Scriabin Étude Op. 2-1, bars 1-8 118 SV 3-1: Grieg Violin Sonata No.3 Mvt. II, the first 16 bars played by Rachmaninoff 185 SV 3-2-1: The first two phrases of the 7th Variation, bars 1-16 186 SV 3-2-2: Bizet-Rachmaninoff Minuet from L'Arlésienne, bars 54-56 188 SV 3-3: Rachmaninoff Prelude in G sharp minor, Op.32 No.12, bars 1-8 189 SV 3-4-1: Chaliapin’s performance of the Farewell aria, bars 1-13 192 SV 3-4-2: Kipnis’s performance of the farewell aria, bars 1-13 193 SV 3-4-3: Christoff’s performance of the farewell aria, bars 1-13 193 SV 3-5-1: Kastorsky’s performance of the Gremin aria, bars 1-7 195 SV 3-5-2: Kipnis’s performance of the Gremin aria, bars 1-7 195 SV 3-5-3: Petrov’s performance of the Gremin aria, bars 1-7 196 SV 3-5-4: Christoff’s performance of the Gremin aria, bars 1-7