Tag: Something For Thursday

Two syrupy 1970s love ballads today!

The lead artist here is singer-songwriter Eric Carmen, who was a big star in the 70s and has had a good career all along. You generally can’t go wrong with the 1970s, where power ballads are concerned. The first, “All By Myself”, is actually one of the iconic power ballads of that era. The second, “Never Gonna Fall In Love Again”, is probably less well-known, but it’s a very representative song of its genre.

I remember hearing “Never Gonna Fall” the first time…on the Muzak system at work. I wasn’t really processing the song playing in the background, because that’s the whole point of Muzak: it’s background music you don’t process. It’s aural wallpaper. We can discuss the virtues, or lack thereof, of Muzak another time…but I remember walking along, vaguely thinking about the song that was playing. Then, it suddenly snapped in to place.

And this is where our 150th Birthday Composer comes in to play.

Both of these songs take their main melodies from Rachmaninoff.

“All By Myself”‘s main tune (not the chorus, but the verses) is from the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and “Never Gonna Fall In Love” gets its tune from the third movement of my beloved Symphony No. 2. Carmen apparently had classical training before he switched to pop music, and thus his familiarity with those two works and his decision to use them in two of his songs.

Unfortunately for Mr. Carmen, he also made some incorrect assumptions regarding the copyright status of Mr. Rachmaninoff’s music. Rachmaninoff was dead by this point and his music was public domain in the USA, but not abroad, where he eventually had to agree to share profits with the Rachmaninoff estate to be able to sell and perform those records. This does not seem to have been a particular contentious affair, but it explains why you might see Rachmaninoff, who died in 1943, credited with a couple of 1970s power ballads.

I’ve seen some arguments occasionally that the suitability of a couple of Rachmaninoff’s melodies to such a use demonstrates their lack of seriousness, but…that’s just goofy. I ignore that stuff. Who’s got time for any of that?

More on the Second Concerto and the Second Symphony to come. In the case of the Symphony, much more to come. That one’s been percolating in my head for years….

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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 wrote his first piano concerto when he was 17 and 18 years old. He dedicated to his teacher and cousin, Alexander Siloti, a composer and pianist who would later play the concerto himself a number of times. The work reflects his youthful exuberance, even if it isn’t quite as openly melodic as the later concertos (he would write four total for piano and orchestra). As a youthful composition, the influences can be heard clearly: the piece begins with a dramatic fanfare-ish introduction that is reminiscent of the Grieg concerto (which happens to be one of the most enduring piano concertos of the entire Romantic era).

Rachmaninoff’s first concerto isn’t imbued with the kind of soaring lyricism that would be the hallmark of his mature work, but there are a lot of moments of wondrous delicacy in this concerto…a spot in the second movement where the bassoon enters with a descending motif, and the second subject of the last movement. Even this early in his career Rachmaninoff was doing amazing things with the contrasts of the second subject in his final movements!

Sixteen years after the concerto’s first publication, Rachmaninoff heavily revised the work in accordance with his experience and knowledge in the intervening years. While the concerto still never achieved levels of popularity equal to his Second or Third concertos–a fact which vexed Rachmaninoff greatly–it is still a charming piece, at times fiery and dramatic, at other times gently lyrical, and at still other times charming and effervescent. Not bad, for a first concerto!

Here is Rachamaninoff’s Piano Concero No. 1, in F-sharp minor.

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