Notes for: August 7, 2018
Rachmaninoff’s early life reads like a Chekhov play. His parents were descendants of land-owning aristocrats, and his mother had brought extensive property as a dowry when she married. But his profligate father went through all the family’s money, their several estates were sold off one by one, and finally, when Sergei was nine, they were forced to move to cramped quarters in St. Petersburg. His sister died of diphtheria, his parents separated, and three years later Sergei failed all his exams at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Worried by what she saw as her gifted son’s laziness and indifference, his mother shipped him off to Moscow at the age of twelve to study piano with, and learn some discipline from, Nicolai Zverev, a famously hard-driving teacher. The plan worked. Sergei buckled down, and under Zverev’s rigorous regime he blossomed as both a pianist and a student. He entered the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in just three years, becoming only the third graduate to win the school’s highest honor, the Great Gold Medal in composition.
Rachmaninoff had begun composing soon after he arrived in Moscow, and he confidently turned out works at a steady clip. What is impressive about these early works is how quickly the young student arrived at his distinctive mature sound. It’s there in the Trio élégiaque No.1, which he wrote in a few days during his final year at the Conservatory. (Later that same year he would write one of his most famous pieces, the Prelude in C Sharp Minor.) Why Rachmaninoff wrote an elegy isn’t entirely clear. The work clearly had a connection to Tchaikovsky, to whom Sergei was devoted: Listeners immediately would recognize that the opening theme was a reversal of the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. But Tchaikovsky was still very much alive. Perhaps Sergei’s Trio was a nod to the Piano Trio that Tchaikovsky wrote to mourn the death of the pianist Nikolai Rubenstein; its first movement also ends with a funeral march.
The structure of the single-movement Trio élégiaque is simple. It opens with the piano presenting a somber, very Russian melody – marked “Lento lugubre” – and closes with the melody repeated as a mournful funeral march. In between, as the music progresses from section to section, soulful passages alternate with great surges of passion, climaxing with a rise to a fortissimo episode, marked “Appassionato,” just before the funeral march. The themes pass from instrument to instrument, with violin and cello getting chances to embellish the Romantic, heart-on-sleeves melodies. But this is a piano-driven work – not surprising, given Rachmaninoff’s keyboard brilliance. From the beginning, it is the piano’s massive chords and big Romantic washes of color that propel the music.
Notes for: August 1, 2023
Rachmaninoff’s early life reads like a Chekhov play. His parents were descendants of land-owning aristocrats, and his mother had brought extensive property as a dowry when she married. But his profligate father went through all the family’s money, their several estates were sold off one by one, and finally, when Sergei was nine, they were forced to move to cramped quarters in St. Petersburg. His sister died of diphtheria, his parents separated, and three years later Sergei failed all his exams at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Worried by what she saw as her gifted son’s laziness and indifference, his mother shipped him off to Moscow at the age of twelve to study piano with, and learn some discipline from, Nicolai Zverev, a famously hard-driving teacher. The plan worked. Sergei buckled down, and under Zverev’s rigorous regime he blossomed as both a pianist and a student. He entered the Moscow Conservatory and graduated in just three years, becoming only the third graduate to win the school’s highest honor, the Great Gold Medal in composition.
Rachmaninoff had begun composing soon after he arrived in Moscow, and he confidently turned out works at a steady clip. What is impressive about these early works is how quickly the young student arrived at his distinctive mature sound. It’s there in the Trio élégiaque No.1, which he wrote in a few days during his final year at the Conservatory. (Later that same year he would write one of his most famous pieces, the Prelude in C Sharp Minor.) Why Rachmaninoff wrote an elegy isn’t entirely clear. The work clearly had a connection to Tchaikovsky, to whom Sergei was devoted: Listeners immediately would recognize that the opening theme was a reversal of the opening notes of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto. But Tchaikovsky was still very much alive. Perhaps Sergei’s Trio was a nod to the Piano Trio that Tchaikovsky wrote to mourn the death of the pianist Nikolai Rubenstein; its first movement also ends with a funeral march.
The structure of the single-movement Trio élégiaque is simple. It opens with the piano presenting a somber, very Russian melody – marked “Lento lugubre” – and closes with the melody repeated as a mournful funeral march. In between, as the music progresses from section to section, soulful passages alternate with great surges of passion, climaxing with a rise to a fortissimo episode, marked “Appassionato,” just before the funeral march. The themes pass from instrument to instrument, with violin and cello getting chances to embellish the Romantic, heart-on-sleeves melodies. But this is a piano-driven work – not surprising, given Rachmaninoff’s keyboard brilliance. From the beginning, it is the piano’s massive chords and big Romantic washes of color that drive the music