Suite No

Portrait of Rachmaninov

Suite No. 2 in C minor for Two Pianos, Op. 17

Sergei Rachmaninov

Born April 1, 1873 in Oneg (near Novgorod), Russia.

Died March 28, 1943 in Beverly Hills, California.

Composed in 1900-01.

Premiered on November 24, 1901 in Moscow, by the composer and Alexander Siloti.

Duration: 25 minutes

The absolute failure of Sergei Rachmaninov’s First Symphony at its premiere in 1897 thrust the young composer into such a mental depression that he suffered a complete nervous collapse. His family, alarmed at the prospect of Sergei wasting his prodigious talent, sought professional psychiatric help. Varvara Satina, an aunt of the young musician, had some time before been successfully treated for an emotional disturbance by one Dr. Nicholas Dahl, a Moscow physician familiar with the latest psychiatric advances in France and Vienna, and she suggested that the family consult him. Rachmaninov, who began treatments in January 1900, recalled years later, “My relatives had informed Dr. Dahl that he must by all means cure me of my apathetic condition and bring about such results that I would again be able to compose. Dahl had inquired what kind of composition was desired of me, and he was informed ‘a concerto for pianoforte,’ which I had given up in despair of ever writing. In consequence, I heard repeated, day after day, the same hypnotic formula, as I lay half somnolent in an armchair in Dr. Dahl’s consulting room. ‘You will start to compose a concerto — You will work with the greatest of ease — The composition will be of excellent quality.’ Always it was the same, without interruption. Although it may seem impossible to believe, this treatment really helped me. I began to compose again at the beginning of the summer.”

During the summer and early fall of 1900 in Italy and Moscow, Rachmaninov wrote the second and third movements of his Piano Concerto No. 2, and played this uncompleted version of the piece at a charity concert in Moscow on October 14, with his cousin Alexander Siloti conducting. The success of that event reinforced the efficacy of Dr. Dahl’s therapy, and Rachmaninov, full of confidence and pride, threw himself into creative work. During the following months, Rachmaninov finished the Second Concerto, and composed a Cello Sonata for his long-time friend Anatoly Brandukov and the splendid Suite No. 2 for Two Pianos. His premiere of the definitive version of the Second Concerto with Siloti in Moscow on November 9, 1901 was received rapturously, as was the first performance of the Suite No. 2 by those same principals at a concert of the Moscow Philharmonic Society two weeks later. The successful premiere of the Cello Sonata with Brandukov on December 2 capped an amazing month of accomplishment for Rachmaninov, during which the 28-year-old composer-performer proved not only that he had defeated his crippling depression but also that he was one of the most eminent talents on the international music scene.

The Suite No. 2 opens with a virile march whose rich harmonies, robust sonorities, and convivial sharing of motives make this one of the most gratifying pieces in the two-piano repertory for performers and listeners alike. Though the second movement is titled Waltz, this gossamer music is really a quicksilver scherzo in the tradition of Mendelssohn. The broad theme of the movement’s contrasting central trio is reminiscent of the Dies Irae (“Day of Wrath”), the ancient chant from the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass for the Dead that obsessed Rachmaninov throughout his life and appeared in various permutations in such other important works as the Paganini Rhapsody, the Second and Third Symphonies, and the Symphonic Dances. The Romance has a lyricism and passion that are almost operatic in character and intensity. Rachmaninov said that the Tarantella which provides the Suite’s dazzling finale was based on a folk song that he heard during his visit to Italy in the summer of 1900, but the melody has never been identified.

Symphonic Dances for Two Pianos, Op. 45

Sergei Rachmaninov

Composed in 1940; arranged for two pianos in 1942.

Duration: 35 minutes

The word that most easily attaches to Rachmaninov and his music is “melancholy.” His photographs, invariably unsmiling, tell of the basic strain of sadness inherent in his personality. It is said that the only time he laughed or showed any joy was among his family and his most intimate Russian friends, and even then, only rarely. Perhaps he never fully recovered from the complete failure of his First Symphony in 1897. Of that painful experience he wrote, “The despair that filled my soul would not leave me. My dreams of a brilliant career lay shattered. My hopes and confidences were destroyed.... When the indescribable torture of this performance at last came to an end, I was a different man.”

World War I, of course, was a trial for Rachmaninov and his countrymen, but his most severe personal adversity came when the 1917 Revolution smashed the aristocratic society of Russia — the only world he had ever known. He was forced to flee his beloved country, leaving behind family and financial security. He pined for his homeland the rest of his life, and did his best to keep the old language, food, customs, and holidays alive in his own household. “But it was at best synthetic,” wrote American musicologist David Ewen. “Away from Russia, which he could never hope to see again, he always felt lonely and sad, a stranger even in lands that were ready to be hospitable to him. His homesickness assumed the character of a disease as the years passed, and one symptom of that disease was an unshakable melancholy.” By 1940, when he composed the Symphonic Dances, he was filled with worry over his daughter Tatiana, who was trapped in France by the German invasion (he never saw her again), and had been weakened by a minor operation in May. Still, he felt the need to compose for the first time since the Third Symphony of 1936. The three Symphonic Dances were written quickly at his summer retreat on Long Island Sound, an idyllic setting for creative work, where he had a studio by the water in which to work in seclusion, lovely gardens for walking, and easy access to a ride in his new cabin cruiser, one of his favorite amusements. Still, it was the man and not the setting that was expressed in this music. “I try to make music speak directly and simply that which is in my heart at the time I am composing,” he once told an interviewer. “If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.” Rachmaninov arranged the work for two pianos in 1942.

The first of the Symphonic Dances, a three-part form (A–B–A), is almost symphonic in scope. It is spun from a tiny three-note descending motive heard at the beginning that serves as the germ for much of the opening section’s thematic material. The middle portion is given over to a folk-like melody. The return of the opening section, with its distinctive falling motive, rounds out the first movement. The waltz of the second movement was inspired by the music of Tchaikovsky rather than by that of the Strauss family. It is more rugged and deeply expressive than the Viennese variety, and possesses the quality of inconsolable pathos that gives so much of Rachmaninov’s music its sharply defined personality. The finale begins with a sighing introduction, which leads into a section in quicker tempo whose vital rhythms may have been influenced by the syncopations of American jazz. Soon after this faster section begins, a pattern reminiscent of the opening phrase of the Dies Irae chant, from the Requiem Mass for the Dead, is heard. The sighing measures recur and are considerably extended, acquiring new thematic material but remaining unaltered in mood. When the fast, jazz-inspired music returns, its thematic relationship with the Dies Irae is strengthened. The movement accumulates an almost visceral rhythmic energy as it progresses, virtually exploding into the last pages, a coda based on an ancient Russian Orthodox chant (which he had earlier used in his All-Night Vigil Service of 1915) whose entry Rachmaninov noted by inscribing “Alliluya” in the score.

Trio élégiaque in D minor for Piano, Violin, and Cello, Op. 9

Sergei Rachmaninov

Composed in 1893.

Premiered on February 12, 1894 in Moscow by the composer, violinist Leo Conus, and cellist Anatoly Brandukov.

Duration: 46 minutes

Though he seldom burdened himself with study or regular class attendance, Sergei Rachmaninov was one of the greatest products of the Moscow Conservatory: he wrote his well-known Prelude in C-sharp minor in 1892, the year of his graduation; at one of his examinations, he played his own Song Without Words for a jury that included Tchaikovsky, and was given the highest possible rating; when he left the school, the faculty unanimously voted to place his name on its Roll of Honor. Among his first compositions as a new graduate was the one-act opera Aleko, whose premiere at the Bolshoi on May 9, 1893 so impressed Tchaikovsky that he offered to have it produced with his own one-act Iolanthe. Inspired by these early successes, Rachmaninov spent the summer of 1893 at the country home of a friend named Lyssikov, a wealthy Moscow merchant, at Lebedin in Kharkov, composing the Fantaisie-Tableaux for Two Pianos (Op. 5), three songs, a sacred choral work, the Two Pieces for Violin and Piano (Op. 6), and a “Fantasy for Orchestra” titled The Rock (Op. 7).

Rachmaninov was back in Moscow by mid-September, when he attended a gathering of musicians assembled to hear Leo Conus’ piano arrangement of the brand-new Sixth Symphony (“Pathétique”) by Tchaikovsky, which was scheduled for its public orchestral premiere the following month. “At the close of the evening, Rachmaninov acquainted us with his newly completed symphonic poem, The Rock,” recorded the composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. “The work pleased us all very much, especially Tchaikovsky, who was enthusiastic over its colorfulness.” Indeed, Tchaikovsky formed so high an opinion of the piece that he asked Rachmaninov if he could conduct it on his European tour the following winter, one of the few works by another composer in which he ever expressed such an interest. The performances, unfortunately, were never to take place. Just six weeks later, on November 6th, only days after the premiere of his “Pathétique” Symphony, Tchaikovsky suddenly died. The loss was a deep personal and professional sorrow for Rachmaninov, who was so stricken by Tchaikovsky’s death that mere words could not contain his grief, and so he poured his feelings into the music of the Trio élégiaque (Op. 9), begun on the day he learned of the tragedy. (Tchaikovsky had written a similar Trio, Op. 50, in memory of his teacher, Nikolai Rubinstein, a decade before.) Rachmaninov applied himself with great intensity to the piece, reporting to his friend Natalia Skalon on December 17th, two days after the score was finished, “While working on it, all my thoughts, feelings, powers belonged to it, to this threnody.... I trembled for every phrase, sometimes crossed out everything and started over again to think, to think.” The Trio, dedicated “to the memory of a great artist,” was premiered by the composer, violinist Leo Conus, and cellist Anatoly Brandukov at an all-Rachmaninov concert of chamber and vocal music in Moscow on February 12, 1894.

The first of the Trio élégiaque’s three movements is an expansive sonata form, full of melody and formal event. It begins with a mournful descending figure in the piano, a sighing motive that had been used in music since the time of the Renaissance to denote grief. Cello and violin drape a long incantatory theme of exotic melodic leadings upon the piano’s obsessive reiterations of the grief motive. An impassioned outburst that drives the violin into its highest register soon quiets so that a brief, unaccompanied cello phrase can lead to the formal second theme, a strongly rhythmic subject based on three descending notes, arranged short–short–long. Rising piano arpeggios introduce the movement’s third subject, reminiscent in shape of the second theme but more lyrical in contour. All three themes contribute material to the development section. A full recapitulation (with the strings and piano exchanging roles for the main theme) rounds out the movement. The second movement is a large-scale set of eight variations of contrasting character upon the hymnal theme played by the piano at the beginning. (Tchaikovsky had also devoted a movement to variations in his Op. 50 Trio.) The finale is arranged in two principal sections: the first is dramatic, filled with sharp contrasts and fiery proclamations; the second recalls the mournful music that opened the Trio.