Sergei Rachmaninoff : Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op.13 Symphony No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 13 Rachmaninov would have become famous if he had done nothing but play the piano. But his true aspiration was to become a composer. At the Moscow Conservatory, his teacher Nikolai Zverev encouraged him to stick to the piano instead of writing music and resented his taking composition classes with Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky. After Rachmaninov tried his hand at composing some piano pieces—he even started an opera, Esmerelda—he realized that he was unable to choose between composition and performance, and so he ultimately decided to pursue both (eventually becoming a fine conductor as well). In 1889, the year he and Zverev parted ways, he sketched and abandoned a piano concerto, but the one he began the following year is his first major work—the one that became his op.1. This is the score that sealed his fate as a composer, and it was completed in a rush of passion and elation, with Rachmaninov working from five in the morning until eight in the evening, and scoring the last two movements in just two and a half days. Rachmaninov played the first movement with orchestra in a concert of student works at the conservatory in March 1892. (He played it with the Chicago Symphony when he made his debut in Orchestra Hall, on December 3, 1909—the first of his eight appearances with the orchestra.) Rachmaninov quickly began to draw attention as a composer. The brooding piano prelude in C-sharp minor he composed in 1892, at the age of nineteen, immediately became the calling card of a young artist’s dreams (and eventually a burden as well: audiences wouldn’t let him leave the stage until he played the work he eventually referred to dismissively as “it”). In 1893, Tchaikovsky, who was already impressed with Rachmaninov’s talent, interrupted work on his final symphony, the Pathétique, to attend the premiere of Rachmaninov’s first opera, Aleko, based on Pushkin’s poem The Gypsies. But the real mark of a nineteenth-century composer was the symphony. And so, at the age of twenty-two—and in the same decade as Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique, Brahms’s Fourth, Saint-Saëns’s Organ, Mahler’s First, Bruckner’s Eighth, and Dvorák’s New World—Rachmaninov set out to write a symphony. https://youtube/watch?v=1q0t683xaWI
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 01:08:37 +0000
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