SERGEI RACHMANINOFF Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 Sergey Vassilievich Rachmaninoff was born at Semyonovo, district of Starorusky, Russia, on April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, California, on March 28, 1943. He composed his Piano Concerto No. 3 during the summer of 1909 in preparation for an American tour and played the first performance at the New Theatre in New York on that November 28 with the New York Symphony Society conducted by Walter Damrosch. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones and tuba, timpani, side drum, cymbals, bass drum, and strings. Duration is about 39 minutes. ![]() When Rachmaninoff came to write his Third Piano Concerto, he had a far different problem from the one that had faced him when composing the Second. At the time he started the earlier concerto, there was a question whether he would ever compose again at all. His confidence and self-esteem had been shattered by the catastrophic premiere of his First Symphony in 1897. (One reviewer at that premiere, the acid-tongued composer Cesar Cui, had commented, “If there were a conservatory in Hell, if one of its talented students were instructed to write a program symphony on ‘The Seven Plagues of Egypt,’ and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would bring delight to the inhabitants of Hell.”) It took Rachmaninoff two years to develop the courage to compose again, and then only after extensive counseling sessions, partly under hypnosis, with a psychiatrist. The result, though, was the C-minor Concerto, which was instantly established as an audience favorite. Thus, by 1909, when he began work on the Third, he had to compete with his younger self. In addition to the success of the Second Concerto, his Second Symphony had just won the Glinka Award of 1000 rubles, beating out Skryabin’s Poem of Ecstasy for the honor. He spent the summer of 1909 planning his first American tour, which began in Northampton, Massachusetts, on November 4 and continued until January. But the culminating event took place in New York City on November 28 when he premiered the new piano concerto with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society. The same forces repeated it two days later at Carnegie Hall and Rachmaninoff played it once more on January 16, 1910, this time with the Philharmonic, Mahler conducting. Program paket c 2013. It was considered a qualified success—respected, though by no means the instant hit of the previous concerto. The general tone of critical response and this from critics who had heard the work three times in the space of seven weeks was that, despite its many and undoubted beauties, the concerto was too long and rather full of notes. The New York Herald predicted that “it will doubtless take rank among the most interesting piano concertos of recent years,” but added the observation as true today as it was then that “its great length and extreme difficulties bar it from performances by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers.” Of course, Rachmaninoff himself was a pianist of “exceptional technical powers,” among the most utterly gifted keyboard artists of all time, and he was writing specifically for himself. Yet he opened the concerto not with a stunning blast of virtuosity but rather with a muted muttering in the strings of a subdued march character and then, after two measures, a long, simple melody presented in bare octaves in the piano. Like so many Russian tunes and so many of Rachmaninoff’s this, one circles round and round through a limited space, only gradually reaching up or down to achieve a new high or low note. Rachmaninoff was often asked whether this was a folk tune, and he always insisted that it was completely original and had simply come into his mind freely while working on the concerto. Musicologist Joseph Yasser has discovered a marked similarity between this theme and an old Russian monastic chant, which the composer might have heard as a boy when, while visiting his grandmother in Novgorod, they made visits to the local monasteries. The distant, buried memory of the chant might then have appeared unbidden, to be further shaped by the mature composer, into the concerto’s main theme.
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