Rachmaninov’s music, with its deep, exquisite melancholy, reflects the profound empathy of the composer’s artistic transformative power, to be turned into pure artistic beauty.
I am listening to a lot of Rachmaninov’s music these days. I found it useful (and somehow, even necessary) to know a bit of the composer’s background to better understand the music.
One convenient way is Apple Music Classical’s professional annotations—writers carefully crafts introductions for a composer in general, for his works, for particular recordings… In-depth, organized and systematic sources.
Sergei Rachmaninov: the beautiful and tortured soul
“Rachmaninoff excelled as a conductor, virtuoso pianist and composer famous for his ripely melodious, wistful strain of late Romanticism.”
Rachmaninov enrolled in the Moscow Conservatory, where he took his exams a year early and graduated aged 19 with the highest possible marks. Shortly afterwards, he wrote the Prelude in C-Sharp Minor (1892), which became his regular encore as a touring pianist.
But then, as a composer, Rachmaninoff suffered blows that reduced his creativity: the poorly performed 1897 premiere of his First Symphony, which resulted in a three-year creative block; the October Revolution of 1917, which forced him to leave his homeland and lead a more-or-less itinerant existence between the U.S. and Western Europe.
His pre-Revolutionary masterpieces include his Second and Third Piano Concertos (1901, 1909) and the soulful and consoling Second Symphony (1907).
Perhaps when Sergei settled in the United State in relief, hoping for a smoother career and life, the universe played yet another brutal joke on an artist.
The relative failure of Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Concerto (1926) led to another creative hiatus, eventually broken with the Variations on a Theme of Corelli for solo piano (1931), followed by 1934’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra with its seductive Andante cantabile variation.
His final work, Symphonic Dances (1940), looks back at Russia with both nostalgia and bitterness, including a vengeful quotation from his choral All-Night Vigil (1915). He died of cancer in Beverly Hills in 1943.
reference:
Apple Music Classical | Sergei Rachmaninoff