Month: April 2023

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Tone Poem Tuesday

When Sergei Rachmaninoff was just 20, he wrote his first major orchestral work, a symphonic fantasy called The Rock, or sometimes The Crag. No lesser a musical luminary than Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was impressed with the piece–there was a brief relationship between the younger composer and the old–and Tchaikovsky apparently proposed including The Crag on an upcoming program of concerts he was planning. Unfortunately, Tchaikovsky died suddenly that same year, and nothing came of those plans.

I wonder what might have been had Tchaikovsky lived and had Rachmaninoff been able to really lean on Tchaikovsky as a mentor figure. A great theme of Rachmaninoff’s life was his yearning for a lost Russia, and the death of Tchaikovsky was probably the first such loss he experienced, twenty-four years before he would lose Russia itself, when Russia lost Russia itself.

As for The Crag, it really sets the stage for what Rachmaninoff will sound like pretty much all through his career: fatalistic brooding shot through with moments of nearly incandescent lyricism, achieved with sure-handed command of the orchestra. Rachmaninoff appended an epigraph to the score, a couplet from a poem by Lermontov:

The golden cloud slept through the night
Upon the breast of the giant-rock

Rachmaninoff apparently claimed a secondary “program” for the work, based on a Chekhov short story in which a young girl and an old man meet in an inn on a snowy Christmas Eve, and he tells her of his life and his regrets.

It interests me that Rachmaninoff’s dark imagination, coupled with intense lyricism, was in full flower this early in his life, before his musical gifts really caught up with it. Here is The Crag.

 

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March on Teevee!

So, what did we watch in March?

::  We went to see Casablanca on the big screen, which makes it by definition the best thing we saw or watched in March. As Casablanca is my second-favorite movie of all time, the only way it could be bested for a month’s viewing is if we watched Star Wars in the same month, which we did not. I wrote about it on my Substack. (And I have got to stop letting so much time pass between viewings of this movie. It was about a year-and-a-half between viewings. Too long, man. Too long!)

::  Your Place Or Mine is a rom-com. Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon play best friends of twenty years who hooked up one time in college…and then settled into platonic bestie-status. They live on opposite sides of the country, and for the purposes of this plot, they agree to switch houses for a week. Then the movie has each become involved in the other’s life, and as the movie goes on, even though they spend the entire film apart, in the end they have to admit that they’re not platonic besties at all. It’s a diverting enough piece of fluff, but if you want the rom-com between two “lovers” who don’t actually show up in the same place until the very last scene, you’re better off with Sleepless in Seattle.

::  Then there’s R.I.P.D., which stands for “Rest In Peace Division”. I cannot lie: we watched this because it has Ryan Reynolds in it, and nothing with Reynolds is ever unwatchable, even if he has made the occasional not-so-great movie…like this one. Oh well, it happens. This movie coulda-woulda-shoulda been better! It’s not bad, but it has some cool ideas that sadly fall flat in the execution. Reynolds is a cop who is killed in the line of duty, but rather than go to the afterlife, he ends up with the Rest In Peace Division — R.I.P.D., get it?–where he teams up with Jeff Bridges, doing his best growly-angry version of The Dude, to track down dead souls who have gone on the run rather than report to their date with, well, the Bad Place. This is a riff of sorts on the Men In Black idea, with dead people instead of aliens, and with the talent on screen I kept thinking that it should be as good as M.I.B., and yet…it’s not. It’s not bad, exactly…but it’s not great, either. Frustrating, really.

::  I remember when Cameron Crowe’s movie Aloha came out, and it got roasted for being bad and uninteresting and also for whitewashing Hawaiian culture by casting white actress Emma Stone as a character who is “one-quarter Hawaiian”. Still, I wanted to see it anyway, because honestly, I’ve loved just about everything I’ve seen by Crowe. I mean, he’s given us Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, all of which are terrific. I am even a fan of Elizabethtown, which is not a highly-regarded movie, and We Bought a Zoo, which isn’t exactly poorly-regarded but isn’t considered in the class of his earlier work, either. So, what about Aloha? Well…I didn’t hate it, but it never really clicks, either, and no, Stone is not terribly convincing as someone keyed in by blood to the concerns of the native Hawaiian population. I didn’t hate it, but it’s not a Crowe movie that I’ll be revisiting any time soon. It doesn’t even offer much by way of Hawaiian travelogue goodness. After the movie, it hit me that the most interesting couple in aren’t the leads (Stone and Bradley Cooper), but the secondary couple, the military couple fallen on marital struggle, played by John Krasinki and Rachel McAdams. It’s never a good sign when the writer-director doesn’t realize who the most interesting people in the movie are, is it?

::  Last Seen Alive is…well, let’s just say that it was the perfect movie to watch while armed with a pitcher of Rum Punch. (Have I posted about the Rum Punch yet? No? Huh….) Gerard Butler and Jaimie Alexander are a married couple who are about to “take a break”, after they visit her parents, when they stop at a truck-stop/convenience store for gas. She disappears, and he proceeds to set out to track her down. If you ever want to watch a movie where the hero makes exactly the wrong decision at nearly every juncture along the way, this is it. Also, if you want to watch a guy sweat, watch Butler in this movie, because he sweats a lot. As Carla from Cheers once quipped when Norm said that he’s been known to sweat a bit, “We could grow rice!” It’s a taut thriller, sure–so taut that the movie doesn’t really take time to make me, you know, care about the characters. Three glasses of Rum Punch really helped this goofy movie go down.

Teevee thoughts:

Actually, not a whole lot! We’re still watching the same shows, really. Next Level Chef is still grinding along, and it’s a fun watch, even with its somewhat strange concept. (Why, I continue to wonder, are all the contestants made to dress the same? I don’t get this.) We also started a cooking show on Netflix called Snack Versus Chef, in which chef contestants are tasked with recreating junk-food snack items like Oreos, Lays Chips, and so on. Kind of fun, though it usually leaves me with the munchies.

We also started watching Wednesday, of which I will only say for now that we’re really enjoying. We watched the first episode as a family, and then The Wife and I continued watching, all the way up to the finale…when The Daughter saw us getting ready to watch that very finale and said, “Awwww, I wanted to watch that show with you!” We’re like, “Sheesh, it’s not like we binged it!” We took two to three weeks to get to the finale, and there are only like 8 or 9 episodes…but as of now, we’re rewatching it with her. And honestly? Watching stuff as a family on occasion is still a delight.

What are you all watching these days?

 

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Rachmaninoff at 150: A Month of Celebration

I’ve been looking forward to this month for a while now! I actually started gathering ideas for an essay or two about Rachmaninoff a year ago, but then I looked up his dates and I realized that 2023 is his sesquicentennial. I’m not going to spend this month blogging about Rachmaninoff and nothing else–it’s also National Poetry Month, after all–but there’s going to be a lot of Rachmaninoff this month. And probably more over the rest of the year, because this is a composer who has meant a great deal to me for quite a few years…going back to high school when I started discovering a particular affinity with the Russian Romantics.

I’ll be posting both here and on my Substack about Rachmaninoff this entire month, so make sure you’re following me on both platforms if you’re at all interested in my personal celebration of one of my most personal relationships with a composer.

Of course, we can’t kick off a month of celebration of Rachmaninoff without actually hearing any Rachmaninoff, can we? So we’ll start with what might be his most famous work, and a work with which he had a strained relationship over his life, because of its tremendous popularity: the Prelude in C-sharp minor, for solo piano. Written as part of a sequence of five small pieces for piano called Morceaux de fantaisie, the Prelude took on a life of its own, to a stunning degree. Rachmaninoff sold the rights to it for a pittance, because he was low on money at the time: he was only 19 years old and was barely a name anywhere, much less the recognition that was to come years later as one of the greatest musicians of his day. Because Imperial Russia was not a signatory to the Berne Convention, Rachmaninoff never received royalties on a work that has been recorded literally hundreds of times and performed live countless times.

The work’s popularity was such that Rachmaninoff could almost never get away with not performing the Prelude at any recital or concert he ever gave. This haunting, doom-stricken and yet lyrical work somehow became an early-20th century classical music analog of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird”. Its performance was occasionally even newsworthy!

From Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (Bertensson and Leyda):

As usual, London papers said more about one encore than about the whole program of his recital [a 1933 concert Rachmaninoff played in London]. The News Chronicle headline:

THE PRELUDE: RACHMANINOFF MUFFS IT.

In the midst of the applause he struck the famous opening chords of IT. He did not even wait for the applause to die down, but flung it at the audience like a bone to a dog.

And here is news which will be a consolation to thousands of amateur pianists: he played it, and he muffed it. Yes, in the rapid middle section, which is such a trial to the amateur, Rachmaninoff himself played two wrong notes.

And a reporter from the Star cornered Ibbs, Rachmaninoff’s European manager, for the “inside” story of IT:

“It is quite a mistake to assume that Rachmaninoff hates it,” he explained. “He thinks it is a very good bit of work. What troubles him is the fact that he is expected to play it every time he is seen near a piano.

“It worries him also to think that the vast majority of people know him only by it, whereas he has written other things as good or better.

“But he face the inevitable many years ago. At Saturday’s concert he said to me, ‘Don’t worry, I know my duty. I shall play it.'”

Here “it” is: the very Prelude in C-sharp minor that vexed Rachmaninoff and yet endeared him to music lovers for decades. It’s not hard to understand why it is one of the enduring piano works, right up there with Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata or any of Chopin’s Nocturnes. The Prelude announces itself with three pounding chords that seem made for one another–it’s one of those musical figures that seems less composed so much as discovered by the composer–and then unfolds over the course of four minutes with rhythmic shifts that feel relentless as the pieces ebbs and flows, builds and falls back, drives and sings.

An interesting thing about this recording: it’s a reproduction on a modern player piano, using piano rolls created by Rachmaninoff himself. So it’s not quite the master himself playing…but also, yes, it is.

And here is the composer again, playing the Prelude in the same way: piano rolls for a reproducing piano (link only, as the video owner has disabled embedding). This time, though, the Prelude is in the context of the Morceaux, which casts it into an interesting light. I’ve always been interested in this tension sometimes in classical music when a given work becomes very popular: oftentimes the popular work is only a part of a larger work that is often supplanted by virtue of the incredible popularity of the one piece. Witness the way “Nessun dorma” became one of Luciano Pavarotti’s signature arias, greatly outshining the popularity of Turandot, the Puccini opera from which it comes.

The Prelude in C-sharp minor seems to me a good starting point for Rachmaninoff, though it wasn’t my starting point with him (we’ll get to that). In it you can hear his virtuosity, his lack of concern with the demands he places on the musician, and the somewhat relentless nature of his brooding. These are all qualities to which we will return in his music, again and again…but there are many other qualities to come.

Welcome to Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Sesquicentennial month.

 

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