Month: April 2023

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Rachmaninoff at 150: Not an easy interview, that Sergei (but who would be, over breakfast?)

One thing I’ve discovered in reading a lot about Sergei Rachmaninoff over the last few months is that while he led a rich inner life, he didn’t really like to talk much about it. Interviews with him tended to be taciturn affairs, or they would be exercises in frustration for the interviewer in which the subject would avoid any topic that might be of interest to anyone but the subject.

Here’s a case in point that ran in a Minneapolis newspaper one hundred years ago!

Transcription:

Rachmaninoff Likes Yankee Griddle Cakes, Scorns Eggs

Russian Pianist More Interested In Breakfast Than In Interview

The name of Sergei Rachmaninoff is written high in the gallery of modern musical immortals–but as he stirred his coffee at breakfast this morning in the Radisson hotel, and liberally deluged his stack of wheat cakes with maple syrup, there was nothing of the great artist about him except for his long, graceful fingers. Tonight, at the Audtorium, those same fingers will do incredible things on the piano. This morning, they grasped a coffee spoon with firmness, and stirred the contents of the cup until the coffee slopped out into the saucer.

Rachmaninoff, pianist-composer, is about as easy to interview as a Russian blizzard. He arrived at 7:30 a.m. today from Winnipeg, and at 8:30 he was still in a state of complete frigidity, so far as interviewers were concerned. It was not that the famous artist was discourteous, but simple that he appears to have a sincere distaste for being interviewed.

Likes Minnesota Pancakes

He answers questions in monosyllables whenever possivle. Only twice did he show signs of loquacity–and then not about himself, but about his personal friend Bruno Walter of Vienna, orchestra conductor who will direct the symphony orchestra a week from Friday night, and about his other conductor-friend, Henri Verbrugghen.

“Walter is a superb conductor,” said Rachmaninoff. “I expected to meet him here, but learned to my disappointment that he will not arrive for a week.”

After this burst of gossip, Rachmaninoff busied himself again with his pancakes, and took a tentative spoonful of soft boiled egg. He pushed the egg cup away.

“Your pancakes in Minnesota are all right, but I cannot say as much for the eggs,” said Rachmaninoff. “Your soil here, too, is remarkable fertile.”

Wants to Tour Lakes

This observation, in view of the fact that the soil hereabouts is covered with a foot, more or less of now, seemed rather far-fetched until Rachmaninoff, forgetting his reticence again, explained that he learned all about soil when he was personally managing his estate in Russia. He has been in Minnesota in the summer, and expects to come back next summer, if possible, for a month or so of vacation in the state of pines and lakes.

“Do you drive?” he was asked.

“Always,” replied the composer, with the greatest vigor he displayed during the entire interview. “Do you think I would trust myself to a chauffeur? Indeed not. I have no use for them, and if I tour Minnesota, I will drive every foot of the way myself.”

Again the great Russian, who has been living in New York since the revolution exiled him from his native land, applied himself to his pancakes, and further questions elicited nothing but sounds which, coming from a less distinguished personage, would have been called grunts.

Thanks to Fillyjonk for calling this to my attention! I’ve had the picture opened in a tab for about six weeks now.

My favorite part of this is when Rachmaninoff starts to open up on the subject of driving. Rachmaninoff loved cars and would often go on long drives to calm his no-doubt jangled nerves. In this he has a major point of commonality with another of my heroes, George Lucas. This particular degree of being less-than-open for an interviewer does seem a bit extreme, even for Rachmaninoff, so one wonder just what the interviewer’s in-person deportment might have been like; the resulting article, while amusing, does seem to walk right up to the line of being rather, wall, jerkish.

But you know, I’m not sure how willing to talk I would be if someone was asking me questions while I was trying to enjoy a stack of hot pancakes, either!

It’s worth remembering, too, that Rachmaninoff was as renowned in his day as a performer as he was a composer, if not even moreso, so here’s a recording of Rachmaninoff performing not his own music, but a Nocturne by Chopin. (Opus 9, No. 2 in E-flat Major, if you must know. This is one of Chopin’s most famous works, and one with which I struggled mightily in my piano playing days. The runs in the last few pages just would not inhabit my fingers at all.)

 

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Something for Thursday: Rachmaninoff at 150

The last major piece of chamber music Rachmaninoff wrote was the Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, and what a work it is. I’ve only discovered it in the last few months, but it’s been slowly creeping toward my personal pantheon of Rachmaninoff’s works. It’s a piece that’s been having me wonder just why I’ve generally avoided chamber music to the degree I have in my life.

Rachmaninoff wrote the piece for a cellist friend of his, Anatoliy Brandukov. Brandukov was one of the finest cellists in Russia, if not the finest, and as such he moved in the same musical circles into which Rachmaninoff was born and from which he learned. Rachmaninoff actually dedicated his Cello Sonata to Brandukov, who also served as the best man at Rachmaninoff’s wedding. As Rachmaninoff himself played the piano when Brandukov premiered the work, it can be understood why the piano part is so wickedly hard: Rachmaninoff never spared the pianist in any keyboard work her wrote, and once again the two voices are so interdependent–the piece’s main themes are often introduced by the piano before being embellished by the cello–that the work is truly best thought of as a Sonata for Cello and Piano, and not merely a Cello Sonata.

This particular performance is a particularly fine one; at times the intensity is almost white-hot. Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello) and his sister Isati (piano) turn in a blazing performance here. It’s extraordinary. In a work like this, to be successful the musicians have to achieve a kind of synchronicity that is often elusive. Here they have it from the first bar to the last. I can’t recommend this particular performance highly enough.

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Rachmaninoff at 150: Six Romances

Of all the various forms of classical music that composers have indulged over the last few hundred years, the one about which I know the least is almost certainly the art song. These works, for voice and piano, have never made a big part of my regular listening, mainly because my main love musically tends to me large ensembles: orchestras, wind ensembles, choirs, and so on. The art song is chamber music of the most intimate kind, and it’s not really to my credit that it’s such an unexplored musical world for me.

Especially when, by all accounts, Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote one of the finest bodies of song literature in all of Russian Romanticism. Songs poured out of him while he lived in Russia, and he had his friends constantly on the lookout for poems that he might set. One of his most famous pieces is actually a wordless song–but we’ll come back to that one. For now, I’m interested in a six-song cycle, “Six Romances”, op. 38. I found an excellent musical description of these six songs here, and I recommend it highly; I find it hard to discuss songs in such concrete terms. But it’s worth noting that as a song composer, Rachmaninoff–as a piano virtuoso of the highest order–was not concerned with simply accompanying the singer. In Rachmaninoff’s songs the piano is equal partner with the vocalist; neither performer is a featured soloist, but the two work together to form a strong whole.

It’s also important to note how strongly the art song was bound, for Rachmaninoff, to Russia itself. After he fled Russia in the wake of the Revolution in 1917 with his family, eventually to settle in America, he never again wrote a song, nor did he even record one or perform one live. Leaving Russia killed the song for him, and music is all the poorer for that.

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Land of the “free”, home of the “brave”

Land of the free…except for reading what you want to read, teaching your kids what you want to teach, seeking the medical care you and your doctor think you need.

Home of the brave…unless you’re a cop who is “frightened for your life”, or some random person whose doorbell rang or onto whose driveway a car turned.

It may be time to change our national anthem. We’re not anywhere close to living up to it. Problem is, it’s hard to make “Land of white people with guns, home of the scared shitless of everything” fit a tune nicely.

 

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My Blue Heaven

I learned a new drink yesterday: the Blue Hawaii.

This is not to be confused with the Blue Hawaiian, which is a slightly different drink that incorporates cream of coconut.

Via liquor.com:

The Blue Hawaii cocktail was born at Honolulu’s Kaiser Hawaiian Village (now Hilton Hawaiian Village Waikiki Resort). In 1957, a sales representative of Dutch distiller Bols asked legendary bartender Harry Yee to design a drink that featured its blue curaçao, a Caribbean liqueur made using the dried peel of the Laraha citrus fruit.

After experimenting with several variations, Yee settled on a cocktail featuring rum, vodka, blue curaçao, pineapple and sweet-and-sour. The drink is still recognized today for its signature blue color, pineapple wedge and cocktail umbrella garnish.

Now, I modified it a bit: I don’t really like vodka (except for a brand called Deep Eddy, a Texas-made line of flavored vodkas that are quite lovely), and I don’t even think I have any on hand, so I just doubled the rum. Everything else, though, I made to spec, and the result was the frothy and fruity and flavorful beverage you see above.

I’m getting better at this and I’m enlarging my repertoire! I will eventually try the Blue Hawaiian, but I doubt The Wife will join me, as she dislikes coconut, for some reason nobody can fathom.

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Knox Farm: a bittersweet return

I returned to Knox Farm today, for the first time since last year. I’ve been wanting to return to my weekly nature walks; they were always calming and inspiring and gave me moments of quiet to recenter my life.

The problem, of course, is that I’d have to go alone. Cane is gone and can’t go with me.

The places we go with certain loved ones really hit differently when we go there without them, don’t they? It felt weird just not having a leash in my hand. Being able to walk or stop at will, without having to take into account the desires of a greyhound who feels it necessary to sniff everything, was…weird. That dog was my companion at such places for eight years. (I could take Carla, but she’s scared of car rides and I don’t want to do that to her. Maybe I’ll try again sometime soon, but I want to get my feet wet again, first.)

It’s been warm of late. The weather is about to turn sharply colder for a few days, but this entire week saw temps in the 70s, and today we’re in the 80s. This was enough to jump-start our spring a bit. The forests are still mostly bare, but…distant hills are starting to look slightly frost-tipped with new green. It’s coming. Hopefully sooner than later.

It was a beautiful walk, and there will be more. I’m going to be getting back to all the old familiar places…but they’ll all feel lonely for a while. I used to take a photo of the two of us and caption it “Adventurers!” on social media. Now, for a while at least, there’s only one adventurer.

 

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Rachmaninoff at 150: The First Symphony

Rachmaninoff did not have a huge symphonic output, in terms of quantity: just three symphonies, written over the course of his lifetime. But in those three symphonies there are entire universes. Rachmaninoff’s ability to get so much varied musical life into a relatively small symphonic output is rivaled probably only by Berlioz, whose idiosyncratic strangeness informed every bar he ever wrote.

Rachmaninoff’s symphonies (and we’re going to be taking these slightly out of order) are purely orchestral, and none of them boast any programmatic content; none of them are nicknamed in any way. They exist in their own musical world, not unlike Brahms’s symphonies, or Schumann’s, or, hewing more closely to Rachmaninoff’s own world, Borodin’s and Tchaikovsky’s.

The Symphony No. 1 in D minor is, like the First Piano Concerto, a youthful work that shows Rachmaninoff’s influences more strongly than his later works, as his voice was still developing. The overt lyricism of Rachmaninoff’s mature era is less in evidence, and there are places where the work’s youthful awkwardness is clear–I note in particular the way the symphony’s ending does seem to go on longer than it should, as if Rachmaninoff isn’t quite sure when to stick that landing–but on the whole the degree to which this symphony is far less well-known than the two that came after it is disappointing.

There are extra-musical reasons for the First Symphony’s obscurity, relative to the rest of Rachmaninoff’s output. Rachmaninoff himself disowned the work not long after he wrote it, and he refused to acknowledge it, perform it, or revise it. He didn’t destroy it or suppress it, he simply ignored it, and when he left Russia in 1917, he made no effort to secure a copy with the rest of his manuscripts, choosing instead to leave the manuscript score in a desk which he bequeathed to a relative who stayed in Russia. That manuscript score was lost, and the entire symphony was thought lost until the complete orchestral parts were rediscovered in the Leningrad Conservatory’s library. Thus the score was able to be reconstructed, and Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony returned to orchestral performance.

But why did Rachmaninoff react so strongly to one of his first major works? Well, that stems from the symphony’s first performance and a subsequent reaction to the work penned by Cesar Cui (I alluded to this incident last month). In short, the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s symphony may well rank as one of the most disastrous premiere performances of a new work by a major composer in history. By all accounts, the orchestra wasn’t the best, and to make matters worse, the work was under-rehearsed, so the faults in the orchestration (Rachmaninoff at this point hasn’t really developed a keen sense of orchestral balance, so in spots the work has a “muddy” sound) were all the more obvious. Worse was that the conductor, Alexander Glazunov, was…well, Glazunov is remembered as a fine composer now, and no history of conducting mentions him much at all, because he wasn’t very good at it. And what’s worse than a lackluster orchestra playing an under-rehearsed new work under the baton of a mediocre conductor? Well, what if that conductor is drunk at the time of the performance?

Basically, every single thing that could make for a bad orchestral performance happened at the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony, and it was apparently so bad that the composer himself, horrified by what he was hearing, actually left the performance before it ended. Disaster, indeed.

But the worst was still to come, when Cesar Cui wrote his review. This particular review stands tall in the history of bad reviews; seriously, this is right up there with Roger Ebert’s famous “I hated this movie. Hated, hated, hated, hated this movie.” Here is the money quote from Cui’s missive:

If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme 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.

Ouch.

This review didn’t just his Rachmaninoff hard; it helped send him into a depressive episode, a mental health crisis, that would endure for several years, and from which he needed psychiatric treatment including hypnosis to emerge. Luckily, when he did emerge, he proceeded to set about writing a second piano concerto…but we’ll be discussing that work soon enough.

Meanwhile, the First Symphony does live on, not quite in infamy, but not in the full embrace of the musical world, either. It’s not a bad listen, by any means! Heard in full with a good (and sober!) conductor at the helm, one is amazed to think that this piece’s initial reception was so poor as to almost scuttle a promising career before it started. It’s not as accessible a listen as Rachmaninoff’s later works; it relies more on motifs than pure melodies. (The motif that opens the work and is heard throughout will appeal to fans of composer James Horner, because it’s identical to the motif that Horner fans would later dub his “Danger Motif”.) The emotional tone is cooler than later works, but it’s still a fine Russian symphony in the tradition already explored by the likes of Borodin and Tchaikovsky. It certainly didn’t deserve the poor serving it received from its first performers, nor did it deserve the virulent reception it got from the critics. The world of Russian music at that time was deeply political, and Rachmaninoff in presenting this symphony ran afoul of clashing schools of musical thought, which is never a good position for a young artist to be in.

So the damage was done…and yet from that damage Rachmaninoff would emerge to write his strongest work. It’s easy to romanticize strife and hard times based on whatever good comes after, but I always have a problem with that, as at times it can seem like an almost fetishization of suffering, or at least a post hoc justification for it.

Anyway, Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony endures.

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[insert clever title for post that’s mostly photos here]

I’m friggin’ tired, y’all. Here’s some pictures.

First, cats.

Here’s Remy, who is a big weirdo. Look at those mutant feet of his.

Here’s Remy and Rosa, in the windows. This week is the first time we’ve been able to keep windows open consistently since last autumn.

This is Daisy, my mother’s cat. She lives a life of quiet feline dignity.

It’s not all cats! Here’s Carla, being dignified:

Here’s Carla not being dignified:

How about food?

This chocolate bar was awesome. If you love those Ferrero Rocher candies, this is for you–especially if you can’t have the Rochers anymore because they contain gluten. This includes The Wife! Ferrero Rochers were one of her favorite candies ever. This is that exact flavor, minus the crispy interior that’s likely from the gluten.

Last week, I broadened my horizons: for the first time, I made tempura:

This was my recipe. It turned out really good! Everything was wonderfully crispy and flavorful. If you haven’t had tempura, it’s a Japanese batter that is used for dipping and deep-frying vegetables and seafood. I did cubes of cod, shrimp, onions, asparagus (between this and grilling, I may well be a new asparagus fan!), and small peppers. The batter is made of rice flour and uses carbonated water for moisture, and the result is a very light and crispy batter that in some places is almost translucent…and yet, it’s there. This was a terrific meal. As they say on The Repair Shop, “Brilliant! I’m quite happy with that!”

And finally, drink. Specifically, rum punch!

As for tonight? The weather has been gorgeous–even a cold-lover like myself feels the wonder in the return of warm days when they finally arrive–and tonight I’m firing up the grill for the first time. Steak and shrimp, here we come!

 

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