April Fool’s Day. A great day for pianists: born of this date were Ferruccio Busoni (1866), Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873), and Dinu Lipatti (1917). But would any of them have played this?
Tag: Rachmaninoff
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Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4 Debut
It was on this date 90 years ago that the Sergei Rachmaninoff gave the debut of his Piano Concerto No. 4, from the keyboard, with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra. It had been 18 years since his previous concerto (which he had unveiled in New York). In the meantime, he had weathered the Russian Revolution and the personal, perpetual obligation of earning a living as a concert pianist.
The original version of the Fourth Concerto was much longer than the one heard at the 1927 premiere. Even so, the work failed to engage either critics or audience. The composer, ever sensitive to criticism (the failure of his Symphony No. 1 plunged him into a depression so profound that it could only be alleviated through hypnotherapy, from which he emerged to write his Piano Concerto No. 2, ecstatically received), prepared a final, authoritative version of the Concerto No. 4 for performance with the Philadelphia Orchestra, this time under Eugene Ormandy, in 1941. The work has never caught the imagination of concert-goers to anywhere near the same extent as the Concertos Nos. 2 & 3.
The original version was released by the Rachmaninoff Estate only in the year 2000. It has since been recorded in this form several times. It’s a very interesting piece. One wonders if the work would have fared better had Rachmaninoff simply stuck to his guns?
The original version of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 4:
PLEASE NOTE: Eric Lu will perform Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, with the Bravura Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Chiu-Tze Lin, at Rutgers University’s Nicholas Music Center in New Brunswick, tonight at 7:30 p.m.
PHOTO: Rachmaninoff and Ormandy in 1938
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Jerome Lowenthal Celebrates 85 Years
Today is the 85th birthday of Philadelphia-born pianist Jerome Lowenthal. Now chair of the piano department at the Juilliard School, here he is in 1968 with Leopold Stokowski, rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.”
And in a more recent interview:
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César Cui The Forgotten Mighty Handful
Among the followers of Mily Balakirev that collectively came to be known as “The Mighty Handful” or “The Five,” unquestionably the least well-known is César Cui. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Modest Mussorgsky, and Alexander Borodin all went on to attain a kind of immortality in Russian music, each having left his indelible mark.
Cui wrote 15 operas, believe it or not – one of them, “William Ratcliff,” earning the highest praise from Franz Liszt – but today, he is remembered, if at all, as a miniaturist, or perhaps as a composer of art song, and at that, the least Russian-sounding of the five.
He shared in common with the others the fact that for him music was an avocation. He paid his bills as a military engineer. Beyond that, however, he was a bit of an outsider – born in Vilnius (now in Lithuania) to a father who had been a general in Napoleon’s army, who stayed and married a local. In addition to Russian, Cui grew up speaking French, Polish and Lithuanian. Perhaps this broader cultural perspective led to a more cosmopolitan approach to music.
As a critic, he was prolific, and he could be blistering in his sarcasm. Perhaps most notorious was his reception of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony:
“If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a program symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.”
The assessment plunged Rachmaninoff into a two-year depression, during which he was unable to compose until being lifted out of his funk by hypnotic therapy. Of course, today everyone knows Rachmaninoff’s music (if not his First Symphony). How many, I wonder, know Cui’s?
Join me this afternoon, on the anniversary of Cui’s birth, when we’ll listen to his “Deux morceaux” for cello and orchestra. We’ll also mark the birthdays of composers Emmanuel Chabrier, Berthold Goldschmidt, and Alfonso Ferrabosco the Elder, as well as conductor János Ferencsik, from 4 to 7:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
IMAGE: With so many whiskers in the room, you know you must be in the company of The Five. Center, left to right: Modest Mussorgsky (standing, by the piano), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev (seated), César Cui (standing, with spectacles), and Alexander Borodin. I don’t know who the chap is standing in the center.
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Glazunov’s Birthday & Prince Igor’s Legacy
Today is the birthday of Alexander Glazunov (1865-1936), a prodigious musician whose talent unfortunately was all too often compromised by drink. It was Glazunov the conductor who, under the influence, derailed the first performance of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1.
On a more positive note, he accomplished minor miracles in the completion of Alexander Borodin’s magnum opus, the opera “Prince Igor.” The oft-told story is that Glazunov jotted the overture down from memory, having heard Borodin play through it once at the piano. By Glazunov’s own admission, the feat wasn’t quite as impressive as all that – he had found a few fragmentary sketches Borodin left behind and simply allowed his imagination to vault off of those, honoring Borodin’s intended structure. Still, it was Glazunov who did the heavy lifting, and if not for him and Rimsky-Korsakov, “Prince Igor” would have never become the icon of Russian music that it has.
Earlier in the hour, we heard the overture in Glazunov’s completion and orchestration of the work. We also had a chance to listen to music by Glazunov’s star pupil, Dmitri Shostakovich – his Concertino for 2 Pianos, written for performance by Shostakovich and his son. Right now we’re enjoying Glazunov’s lovely and languid Symphony No. 4, in a recording with Gennadi Rozhdestvensky conducting.
In the 5:00 hour, we’ll be celebrating the birthday of American composer Douglas Moore (1893-1969) with selections from his opera, “The Ballad of Baby Doe,” with Beverly Sills in the title role, and his delightful suite, “The Pageant of P.T. Barnum” in a classic recording conducted by Howard Hanson.
The 6:00 hour will be all-Brazilian, including a piece for string orchestra by Clarice Assad, the daughter of guitarist Sergio Assad, as we continue to play off of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro.
Our trajectory takes us from Russia to Brazil today, until 7:00 EDT, on WWFM – The Classical Network and at wwfm.org.
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