A piano concerto, today, and a very modern one at that: composed in 2018 and premiered a year later, Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? is the third piano concerto by composer John Adams.
Adams is best known for his operas Nixon in China and The Death of Klinghoffer, but he has been a prolific composer in many genres, and he may well be the best known contemporary American composer alive, aside from possibly film composers like John Williams. Adams has had a long career and thus his work has evolved over the years, but he is most often characterized as a “minimalist”, writing works that often rely on repeated rhythmic and melodic motifs. This piece is no different.
Cast in three movement-like sections that are played without pause, the concerto deploys a number of interesting effects, like giving the piano a kind of honky-tonk sound. The second movement uses a minimalist kind of lyricism, and the last movement returns to the upbeat feel of the first, but with a more care-free, dancelike character. The three sections are given these tempi by Adams:
Gritty, funky, but in Strict Tempo; Twitchy, Bot-like
Much Slower; Gently, Relaxed
Più Mosso: Obsession / Swing
That first is particularly interesting: “Twitchy, Bot-like”, as if to suggest a mechanistic feel in the first movement that slowly gives way throughout the work until the last movement takes on a more improvisational feel.
Here is Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?, by John Adams.
The warm months of the year, for us, tend to be bookended by two specific festivals: the Rochester Lilac Festival in May, and the Ithaca Applefest in October. Lots of stuff happens in between, but those are the markers of “outdoor stuff” season. So, yesterday we were off for the Lilac Festival!
Which was, this year, well…we’ve been enjoying gorgeous weather recently. Today is sunny and wonderful. The days leading up to yesterday were also mostly pleasant and nice. But yesterday itself was…a soggy rainfest that started before we even left for the day. Here I am, staring existentially out the back window at the gray rains. (More specifically, I’m waiting for my water to boil for coffee.)
We got to the Festival and tracked down our favorite food truck for poutine, which we were lucky enough to eat out of the rain in a big food tent. So that was nice. Poutine is always lovely.
Pulled-pork Poutine
But then we were out into the rain to try to see some of the lilacs and the various trees in Rochester’s Highland Park.
Reservoir at the crest of Highland Park. City drinking water is sourced here.
We didn’t walk around nearly as much as we usually do, because it was raining. I had an umbrella, but it’s on the small side, and The Wife wore a coat that she believed to be waterproof. (This turned out to be incorrect, so we stopped into a tie-dye clothing vendor at the Festival’s art sale and bought her a shirt just so she’d have something dry to change into. Some years, the anniversary gifts aren’t as romantic as others, I must admit.) I stayed mostly dry, thanks to my umbrella, but I have determined that I need a larger umbrella, probably one of those gigantic ones that some folks carry around. I concluded this because it turns out that the sleeves of a poofy shirt can actually exceed the coverage provided by your small umbrella, with dampening results:
Not one but two wet sleeves. Oh well, live and learn. Onto the shopping list a bigger umbrella goes.
Later on we went to The Chicken Coop in Webster, NY for fried chicken. We love this place and it’s a favorite destination of ours now when we’re passing through that particular part of town.
So, the day was something of a mixed bag, alas.
Up in the title to this post, I mention Rachmaninoff. There is a tie-in here: specifically the lilac flower. In 1902 Rachmaninoff wrote a song cycle, 12 Romances, one of which is a setting of a poem about lilacs. From this sprang an odd gesture of appreciation from one of the composer’s fans, as described here by Bertensson and Leyda in Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music:
It was about the time of his return from America that the mysterious activities of the “white lilacs lady” began. Rachmaninoff could give no concert or recital without a bouquet of white lilacs among the floral tributes. Bouquets of white lilacs were also delivered on every birthday, every saint’s day; and if he happened to be abroad on those dates, the white lilacs would just as surely arrive at his hotel or the compartment of his train. The notes accompanying this tribute were always brief and tender, congratulating him on his birthday or wishing him success in the concert, and the only signature was the Russian initials of “White Lilacs”; the song “Lilacs” in Op. 21 appears to have inspired this extraordinary labor of love. Rachmaninoff appreciated the lady’s incognito as deeply as the simple, warm words of her notes, though sometimes the gift was a little flamboyant–especially when the everlasting white lilacs arrived on schedule in the depth of winter. Not only did bouquets, wreathes, and other ornamental florist’s designs arrive with these flowers but the gift took other forms, such as an ebony conductor’s baton engraved with a design of white lilacs and Rachmaninoff’s initials. The giver’s identity remained hidden from the composer and all members of his family.
Fortunately, the mystery did not remain so. From the footnote in Bertensson and Leyda:
It was not until 1918, after the Rachmaninoffs had gone abroad, that “White Lilacs” was identified. Sophia Satina [the composer’s niece] tells of this: “As I walked to my laboratory one day I heard a horse galloping behind me: I turned and saw a cabman whipping the horse frantically, with an elderly woman standing in the lurching cab, clinging to him with one hand and waving to me with the other. When they came up to me, this woman, breathless and agitated, said, ‘Thank God! How happy I am to find you! I am White Lilacs–my name is Rousseau.–Where is Rachmaninoff? Is he alive?’ She was overjoyed to hear that he was well and working abroad. When Sergei Vasilyevich heard about Mme. Rousseau, he offered to help her to leave Russia, but she preferred to stay in Moscow with her daughter.”
Apparently when it became clear to Mme. Rousseau that Rachmaninoff would not be returning to Russia at all, in the wake of the Revolution, she ceased the gifts of lilacs. I do not know what became of her after this, but I do wonder if Rachmaninoff missed the constant presence of white lilacs in his later life…perhaps not as a reminder of a specific admirer, but as one more way his beloved Russia of old was gone forever.
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.
Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.
In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.
The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!
I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)
I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.
A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.
V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.
V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.
Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:
SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfootare sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.
:: Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.
In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.
LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”
A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!
Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.
Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.
Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.
Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.
Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!
In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.
If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.
Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!
There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!
:: Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.
I happened on this artist yesterday via social media. I liked this song a great deal, and I plan to explore her music more. Her name is Áine Deane (the first name is apparently pronounced “Onya”), and she is from the UK. Enjoy!
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.
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.
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.
