1907: Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 2 in E minor, age 34

(An excellent review for this recording)

Iván Fischer

I. Largo – Allegro moderato, E minor

II. Allegro molto, A minor

III. Adagio, A major

IV. Allegro vivace, E major

Leonard Slatkin

I. Largo – Allegro moderato, E minor

II. Allegro molto, A minor

III. Adagio, A major

IV. Allegro vivace, E major

Instrumentation:

• piccolo, 3 flutes, 2 clarinets, 3 oboes, cor anglais,  bass clarinet, 2 bassoons
• 3 trumpets, 4 horns, , 3 trombones, tuba
• timpani, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals, glockenspiel
• strings

Premiere:

The premiere was conducted by the composer himself in Saint Petersburg on 8 February 1908. The score is dedicated to Sergei Taneyev, a Russian composer, teacher, theorist, author, and pupil of Tchaikovsky.

1st movement:

Because of time restraints in early recordings, the exposition was played only one time and various other cuts were made. Today because of the far greater the length of CD’s and other recordings, cuts are no longer necessary for such reasons. So today many performances go in the opposite direction, repeating everything. But the best recordings of this movement that I’ve heard do not repeat the exposition but after that do not cut anything else.

While listening to this you may feel as though you are hearing film music. Of course film music owes a debt to music like this. The mood is dramatic, lush and extremely romantic.

2nd movement

This is an ABA‑C‑ABA structure. I read that almost a third of it was hacked away for reeasons of time until the 1970s, but I’ve never heard it butchered that way. Most likely it was in place of a scherzo, since it has a lighter feel in spite of the beat being in four. This movement may be the most perfect in this symphony in terms of structure. It is very compactly composed. As you listen to it, every section flows perfectly to the next section.

3rd movement

This movement inspired a pop song in 1976 by American pop rock artist Eric Carmen.“Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” peaked at number 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100 chart in June 1976, remaining in the Top 40 for ten weeks. The song reached number one on the Billboard Easy Listening chart. In Canada, it was a number-one hit on both charts. Rachmaninov’s music starts as simply as the pop song, but with the lush orchestration and the passionate building of tension in the middle there is much more to this than “a pretty melody”. For me the similarity to some of the music of Rimsky-Korsakov is very strong, and the whole tradition of Russian music is incredibly powerful.

4th movement

This has a lot of the swashbuckling sound of film music from around the 1930’s and perhaps a bit later, but of course it was all written much earlier, in the beginning of the 1900s. Again and again you will hear a tradition of highly emotional, descriptive music that sounds timeless. You hear the same sounds in modern film scores, and of course this is music another composer, John Williams, channels in his own music, along with so many others. People who have watched a countless movies will also hear things that sound a lot like Korngold, who was famous for the music to Robin Hood. One of the chief characteristics of Romantic music is starting with dark, brooding sounds in the first movement. Then what follows in the slow movement is more hopeful, usually very thoughtful, often almost like a dream. Then the final movement moves into something extremely optimistic and vibrant. This tradition for the most part started with Beethoven.

A very long symphony…

His 2nd symphony is over an hour long, performed as Rachmaninov intended it to be heard. It has the kind of length we associate with Mahler, and that means it takes some patience and the right mood to absorb it.

Recording problems on records…

It was also a huge problem to record back in the days when most people listened to records. Generally vinyl was limited to around 45 of play on both sides, and this was one of many reasons most conductors cut the symphony in recordings.

The cuts ruined the music…

The problem is that such changes in a masterwork ruins it. It changes the balance, changes the form and in general gives us no idea of what we should be experiencing while listening to it.

The composer was forced into agreeing to having his music mutilated…

Rachmaninov more and more began to doubt himself and the worth of his music, and so he reluctantly and submissively agreed to having his symphony sliced and diced. People incorrectly assumed he was fine with this – he was not. But the realities of the time more or less forced him to agree.

Rachmaninov was pushed into cutting much more…

He was convinced in the early ’30s to make cuts in this symphony and agreed to 20 in all. This went on for decades and is a prime example of what happens when an artist is convinced to make changes that are just plain bad. It is only fairly recently that we get to hear the music the way it is supposed to sound.

The worst cuts of all…

The earliest recording, made by Nikolai Sokoloff in 1928 (digitally transferred for the Cleveland Orchestra’s 75th-anniversary limited edition), lasts 46 minutes. That means most of the world only heard around 70% of the music at the time it was recorded.

Only in recent years, when conductors have begun to perform this symphony in its entirety, has Rachmaninov’s true achievement as a composer been revealed.

Always popular in Russia…

Rachmaninov’s music – other than Symphony No. 1 – was extremely popular in Russia, so his music was always fully respected there.

But he was out of step in the West…

The moment he left Russia in 1917, he was attacked for being out of touch with modern music, a relic, someone only connected to the past. Again and again in progressive music circles it was fashionable to trash his music. Other musicians predicted that soon his music would fall out of favor, that his popularity with the public was a passing phase.

He was dismissed as a failure…

By the time of his death in 1943, he had been written off as an old-fashioned composer – hopelessly sentimental, out-of-touch, and irrelevant. As Virgil Thomson told the young playwright Edward Albee in 1948:

 “It is really extraordinary, after all, that a composer so famous should have enjoyed so little the esteem of his fellow composers.”

Formal sources agreed that his music had no lasting worth…

The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, in its fifth edition, published in 1954, finished with this damning appraisal of his art:

“The enormous popular success some few of Rachmaninov’s works had in his lifetime is not likely to last and musicians never regarded it with much favor.”

Today the world has reversed all those negative opinions.

Today his music continues to grow in popularity, showing how wrong these short-sighted people were. But of course the majority of critics and reviewers are usually wrong about everything, so none of this should come as a surprise.