AT A GLANCE

Rachmaninoff Rapture

Rachmaninoff the man may have had his insecurities, but his music has an epic grandeur of sound and spirit that has endeared it to audiences and performers alike. This is particularly true of his works for solo piano and orchestra, masterpieces all, with which Yuja Wang has been intensely involved since the beginning of her career. (Her first recording with orchestra paired the Piano

Concerto No. 2 with the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.) She revels in “surfing the orchestral waves,” and in the sincerity, songfulness, and sheer Russianness of the music. She also—and unusually—finds a lot of wit in the Rhapsody. The lean and biting Symphonic Dances make a vivid contrast to the lushness of the concertos but are still unmistakably Rachmaninoff. —John Henken

PIANO CONCERTO NO. 1 Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)

Composed: 1891; 1917, 1919

Orchestration: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, percussion (cymbals, triangle), strings, and solo piano

First LA Phil performance: July 12, 1960, William Steinberg conducting, with Byron Janis, soloist

“I have rewritten my First Concerto,” Rachmaninoff communicated to a friend. “It is really good now. All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention. When I tell them in America that I will play the First Concerto, they do not protest, but I can see by their faces that they would prefer the Second or Third.”

Youthful freshness is not an unexpected quality considering that the first movement of the Concerto was written by a student musician of 17, and the second and third movements when he was all of 18. What is remarkable is that Rachmaninoff maintained the freshness when he revised the work in 1917, some 26 years later. By that time, he had many major works to his credit—in addition to the Second and Third Piano Concertos, there were two symphonies, for the second of which he had won the prestigious Glinka Prize. And he had become celebrated not only as a composer but also as a pianist and conductor. The First Concerto, then, reflects both a teenaged Rachmaninoff who was already in possession of a strongly defined compositional style and a mature, worldly, and experienced creative artist.

The 26-year delay between the completion of the Concerto and its final revision is typical of Rachmaninoff’s somewhat haphazard approach to composing. The fact is, in his youth he was known as a somewhat lethargic student. Yet, in spite of his efforts to avoid hard work, he turned out some impressive scores even before graduating from the Moscow Conservatory: In addition to the First Concerto, there was the one-act opera Aleko, which won the admiration of Tchaikovsky, and several piano pieces, including the C-sharp-minor Prelude, whose immense success hounded the composer throughout his life. And of course, the emotional abyss into which he fell following the failure of his First Symphony in 1897 halted his productivity until a kind of hypnosis treatment brought him out of the depression and into the glories of the Second Piano Concerto.

In the matter of compositional style, the First Concerto is thoroughly characteristic of Rachmaninoff’s once and always manner, which is both Russian and Romantic. In regard to the former, the composer said, “I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook.”

Continuing this statement, Rachmaninoff in effect explained the Romanticism of his music: “My music is a product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music. I never consciously attempted to write Russian music, or any other kind of music.” Neither did he attempt to explore any of the contemporary stylistic trends that were appearing on the horizon. Rachmaninoff might have entered the new century making bold new sounds—after all, he was only 27 in 1900. But his musical mentality was of a different order than that of, say, his countryman Stravinsky, and he remained virtually impervious to the shock waves of the revolutionary salvos being released in the Europe of his time. Rachmaninoff the incorrigible Romantic continued throughout his career to operate in his own distinctive creative orbit, an orbit defined by plush lyricism that rides the waves of luxurious, enriched harmonies, and, in the piano works, expansive, richly detailed virtuosity in the grand 19th-century bravura tradition.

The mark of youthful impetuosity is particularly apparent at the opening of the First Concerto, where an urgent two-measure fanfare in horns, clarinets, and bassoons sparks a fiery entrance from the piano, which, erupting high in the treble, lunges down the keyboard in blazing double octaves and chords. In his subsequent three piano concertos, the firstmovement scene is set with far more reserve and seriousness: at age 17, temperamental abandon came naturally. Following this introductory boldness, which climaxes in a cadenza-like flourish, the strings sing the lyric main theme, after which the piano takes the melody, adorning it with inimitable Rachmaninoffian decoration. Later, a stunning cadenza that follows an expanded return of the fanfare opening treats the main materials in a fantastic, brilliant fashion.

The middle movement’s nocturnal atmosphere, initiated by a horn solo, may echo the mood of the slow movement of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, but the melting, extended piano solo that follows resonates with the pure Romanticism of Rachmaninoff. In this movement as in the vital finale, the pianism is absolutely ravishing and quite able to compensate for the somewhat wobbly structural stability, and, in the last movement, for the theme in a slow middle section that exceeds the acceptable level of sugar content. What matter: “It is really good now … it plays itself so much more easily” (if one has the fingers and the soul of Rachmaninoff). —Orrin Howard

Symphonic Dances

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Composed: 1940

Orchestration: piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (bass drum, chimes, cymbals, orchestra bells, snare drum, tam-tam, tambourine, triangle, and xylophone), piano, harp, and strings

First LA Phil performance: February 18, 1943, William Steinberg conducting

We now recognize and admire Rachmaninoff as a creator of moodily memorable melodies, without feeling the need, as we once did, to apologize for the beauty of those melodies—or blame him for being widely emulated by composers of film scores (who, likewise, are now regarded with a degree of respect formerly denied them), or the creators of the popular love songs his melodies inspired.

Rachmaninoff summed up his life as a composer shortly before his death, in Beverly Hills, his final home: “In my own compositions, no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic, or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible. I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music... I have been strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky and RimskyKorsakov; but I have never, to the best of my knowledge, imitated anyone. What I try to do when writing down my music is to make it say simply and directly that which is in my heart when I am composing. If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.”

For most of his career Rachmaninoff, also one of the great pianists of his time, was the object of critics’ scorn for remaining stylistically rooted in the 19th century while living in the 20th. At the end of his life, however, with the present Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff combined a modernist rhythmic element— inspired by Stravinsky and Prokofiev—with his own unquenchable penchant for the big, big tune.

The Symphonic Dances had its beginnings as far back as 1915, in sketches for a ballet score called The Scythians (not to be confused with a similarly titled work by Prokofiev) that he submitted to dancer-choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who rejected them as “unballetic.” A quarter-century later, while living on New York’s Long Island, Rachmaninoff resurrected ideas from The Scythians to form the first movement of the Symphonic

Dances, premiered in 1941 by its dedicatees, Eugene Ormandy and his Philadelphia Orchestra. The initial reception for what is now widely regarded as Rachmaninoff’s most important symphonic work was lukewarm. The audience wanted more lushness, the critics less. It has since become the darling of critics among the composer’s scores and, increasingly, an audience favorite.

Interestingly, Rachmaninoff, his performers’ capabilities ever in mind, was in the habit of having an accomplished violinist check the practicability of the bowings for all his works involving strings. For the Symphonic Dances, this function was fulfilled by no less than Fritz Kreisler, Rachmaninoff’s frequent recital partner. Since Kreisler considered no violin part too difficult, the score emerged as music for a virtuoso orchestra.

The terse, march-like opening thematic figure dominates the entire first movement. It features prominently even in the gorgeously mournful, quintessentially Russian episode for the alto saxophone, whose part was submitted to another expert, the composer and Broadway arranger Robert Russell Bennett, for his approval. The final theme of the movement, announced staccato in the strings, is an exotic, richly chromatic affair that Rachmaninoff seems to have lifted from his de facto orchestration textbook, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera

The Golden Cockerel. In the coda, Rachmaninoff quotes the opening theme of his First Symphony (1895). Does this act signify coming full circle? One hazards such a guess since the premiere of the Symphony was so disastrous that it caused critics to predict that Rachmaninoff had no future as a composer. Furthermore, the noisily hostile reception for the symphony, while not quite in a class with that later accorded Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, contributed to Rachmaninoff’s subsequent nervous breakdown.

The second dance opens with menacing chords (stopped horns and muted trumpets), followed by an eerie waltz that moves from near-lethargy to extreme agitation. The movement concludes with soft, scampering woodwind-and-string figures that suggest the participants not so much ending their dance as being blown away, still whirling, out of their dark, ghostly ballroom into an even darker night. The third and final section mixes Russian Orthodox chant and the medieval chant for the dead, “Dies irae.” The church is further represented by the “Alleluia” theme from the composer’s own choral Vespers (1915), which eventually muscles out the “Dies irae”: a symbolic triumph of life over death? Withal, this was the last music Rachmaninoff ever wrote. Two years later, and a month after becoming an American citizen, he died (of cancer), a few days short of his 70th birthday. —Herbert Glass

Gustavo Dudamel

For a biography of Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel, please turn to page 7

Yuja Wang

Pianist Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty, and captivating stage presence. Artist-in-Residence at both the Czech Philharmonic and the Rotterdam Philharmonic in 2021/22, she has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians, and ensembles, and is renowned not only for her virtuosity, but also her spontaneous and lively performances, famously telling The New York Times, “I firmly believe every program should have its own life, and be a representation of how I feel at the moment.” This skill and charisma were recently demonstrated in her performance of the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 2 at Carnegie Hall’s openingnight gala in October 2021, following its historic 572 days of closure.

Yuja was born into a musical family in Beijing. After childhood piano studies in China, she received advanced training in

Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music under Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Two years later, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and recordings. She was named Musical America’s Artist of the Year in 2017 and, in 2021, received an Opus Klassik Award for her world-premiere recording of John Adams’ Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel.

As a chamber musician, Yuja has developed long-lasting partnerships with several leading artists, notably violinist Leonidas Kavakos, with whom she has recorded the complete Brahms violin sonatas and performed duo recitals in America in the autumn. In 2022, Yuja embarked on a highly anticipated international recital tour, which saw her perform in world-class venues across North America, Europe, and Asia, astounding audiences once more with her flair, technical ability, and exceptional artistry in a wide-ranging program to include Beethoven, Ligeti, and Schoenberg.

Intermusica represents Yuja Wang for worldwide general management.