I’ve featured this piece before, and it’s not even by Rachmaninoff. So how does it tie in? Because when it was composed for the film Dangerous Moonlight, a World War II potboiler whose protagonist is a talented pianist and composer, it was as a replacement for the originally planned work: Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto (which will be the major topic of my next Substack newsletter). It’s not entirely clear why the Rachmaninoff couldn’t be used–copyright fees, perhaps–and the producers tried commissioning a work from Rachmaninoff directly, but he turned the offer down. So, in the Concerto’s stead, a new work was composed–in pieces, which are heard through the film. The entire work was basically stitched together by the film’s orchestrators, resulting in the work that is fairly well-known today as a single-movement work: the Warsaw Concerto, by Richard Addinsell.
It’s also one of the best intentional pastiches of a specific composer’s style that I’ve ever heard. Here it is:
