Latest news with #Rachmaninoff
Washington Post
25-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
The D.C. plane crash took her mom and sister. She turned to her piano.
Anne Valerie Ter sat on the short black bench in her piano teacher's basement, her mother's warm voice encouraging her as she draped her fingers over the keys to begin Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2. 'Come on, you need to practice more,' she heard her mother, Olesya Taylor, say. The 14-year-old had spent the previous three months perfecting the piece — every dynamic, each delicate trill and sharp staccato. She planned on performing it at a concerto competition that was about two weeks away, where Taylor and Anne Valerie's younger sister, Olivia Ter, planned to be in the audience, proudly watching. But they both existed only in her mind that January day. Olesya Taylor was dead. So was Olivia, 12. Authorities hadn't confirmed it yet, but Anne Valerie knew in her gut that they had not survived the American Eagle Flight 5342 crash with a U.S. Army helicopter near Reagan National Airport the night before. The symphony of her adolescence — chatty car rides with her mother, the blade on her sister's foot scraping against the ice as she landed a triple toe loop as a budding and talented skater, whispers of secret passcodes to enter bedrooms in the Ter family house — all came to a sharp halt at 8:48 p.m. on Jan. 29. Anne Valerie pressed her hands into the piano keys, Rachmaninoff watching from a black-and-white portrait on the wall. The hammers lowered in the piano's interior, and sound emanated from the instrument. But it was lifeless, the chords hollow and deflated. Her typically zealous and full-bodied artistry at the piano bench was absent. Anne Valerie's teacher, Anna Balakerskaia, later recalled wondering about the competition. 'You'll be able to do this?' she asked Anne Valerie, 'AV' for short. 'I want to do it,' she told her teacher. 'My mom really wanted me to win.' So they prepared to win. Many in the classical music world know Sergei Rachmaninoff's second piano concerto as notoriously challenging to play. What's less known is that the composer finished writing the piece in 1901, following a period of deep depression, dedicating it to his therapist as he emerged from darkness back into light. Andrew Ter, AV's dad, wondered what it would take to bring his daughter back to light. He and his wife, Olesya, met while working together at a small IT consulting company in Northern Virginia shortly after each arrived from Russia in 1998. They built a life together in Alexandria, Virginia. Now, after the crash, Ter said, he thought of AV and how she would proceed without her mother and sister. He thought of her life, her next steps — orthodontist appointments and school classes. Then a truly dreadful thought flickered into his mind: Would she ever play piano again? For AV, the piano was an extension of herself, from the time she first laid eyes on the instrument as a 1-year-old. Taylor had signed her up for a toddler photo shoot. The photography studio featured a smattering of little props for the children to play with. One was a tiny piano. AV was mesmerized instantly. 'I come up to the piano and I start smacking the keys,' she said. By 4 years old, she was taking lessons. By 5, she was competing and winning. By 7, she was practicing three to four hours a day and playing with orchestras. Soon, afternoons were filled with instructors interjecting criticisms about dynamics and phrasing. Evenings were punctuated by drilling melodies and foot-pedaling techniques. Weekends featured trips up Interstate 95 from the family's home in Northern Virginia to train at Baltimore's prestigious Peabody Institute music conservatory. 'Nobody pushed me or anything,' AV said. 'The passion just grew.' She sparkled with big dreams of performing with the National Symphony Orchestra or headlining Carnegie Hall. Her musicianship drew the family closer. Taylor, who studied music herself before becoming a health care professional, relished helping her daughter select pieces to play and choose recital outfits. 'She was so into it,' Andrew Ter said. Olivia grew so accustomed to the sounds of the piano in the home that she couldn't go to bed without them. 'I can't fall asleep without you playing,' she once scolded AV on a night the older sister dared to take off from practicing. As Olivia grew older, she turned into a friendly competitor as well. 'She watched her older sister being first and being best and making all the achievements and winning awards, and she tried to keep up,' Andrew Ter said. 'She wanted to have a whole shelf full of medals like her older sister.' In the week after the crash, structure became a religion in the Ter household, a way to keep themselves from swirling in the vortex of all that the tragedy had sucked from their lives. The plan: keep moving forward. Andrew Ter tackled a project to cover the basement floor in laminate that had been put off for 15 years. His brother, Nerses, who'd flown in from a part of Ukraine occupied by Russia, pitched in. AV dived back into her academic classes: AP chemistry, AP U.S. history and AP calculus BC. Though only 14, she was already in 10th grade. School was all online to make more time for piano. In her mom's absence, a devoted crew of family friends alternated shuttling the teen across the D.C. area and to and from Baltimore on weekends for music classes and tennis. In her free time, she went to get boba tea with friends and became immersed in long chats on the phone. Mostly, she kept moving forward. Evening after evening, she returned to the Steinway in her living room to wrestle with Rachmaninoff's monstrous composition — a minefield of technical challenges and wide-open chords difficult for the average-size hand to reach that is imbued with a majestic yearning. The chords flowed from AV's fingers, filling the space where her mom would often sit perched on the taupe-colored couch to offer some musical guidance or just share an entertaining Instagram reel. She struck the keys with force, and the sound waves reverberated up toward Olivia's empty room, where unicorn, owl and dinosaur stuffed animals were still tucked in from when she left for skating camp in Wichita. As the days passed, the tragedy started taking root around AV — in her grandmother's sobs, in preparations for the funeral that would be held in mid-February, in dozens of people filtering through the home bringing meals and condolence cards piling up on the dining room table. She kept playing. She dug into the keys and poured out the pain. By the end of that week, four strings inside her piano's frame had snapped. 'It was the first time I ever broke a string,' AV later said. 'Because of how much power I was putting into the piano.' Competition day fell on a Sunday in early February. The mini performance hall at Levine Music school's Northwest Washington campus buzzed with family members and judges. Balakerskaia squeezed AV's hand as they sat side by side in the audience waiting to go on. Two pianos sat in the middle of the stage before a thick red curtain. Balakerskaia assumed her position at the one in the back to play the concerto's orchestrations. AV took her place at the piano in the front, the pleats in her long black skirt illuminated by the stage lights. Her father sat in the audience and started to record. His hands shook. She smiled down at the keys, then placed her fingers on the keyboard. Her fingers glided up and down the piano, articulating every sound in a quick cascade of notes. The music transitioned into a resounding military-style march. Wide intervals between chords created a grand and sweeping sound. As the dynamics in the sheet music escalated, demanding louder and sharper tones, so did the intensity pulsating through AV. The tone shifted again, from heavy to delicate. Her fingers fluttered, tickling the high notes. In the middle of the piece came a twinge of sadness peeking through the harmonies before the music erupted into an even larger and more majestic composition. AV and Balakerskaia paused, locked eyes and nodded together as they struck a bright chord in unison to launch into the final few segments. Then, a rush of applause as AV smiled at the crowd and politely bowed. After all the students finished playing, event organizers announced the two grand prize winners: a cellist, Andrew Chi, and a pianist, Anne Valerie Ter. Andrew Ter cheered, full of emotion. Friends rushed over and encircled AV. For a moment, there was just happiness and light. Twin white caskets gleamed inside St. Nicholas Orthodox Cathedral in Northwest Washington on Feb. 14, Valentine's Day. Olivia was in the left one, Olesya in the right. Young ice skaters, friends and family members dressed in black crowded into the narrow church, where slivers of light streamed in through tall, thin windows. A small group of men in white robes performed rituals, clanging bells and passing candles as the church choir sang. Andrew Ter and Olga Kostygova, AV's grandmother, approached the caskets. AV, donning a thin gray headscarf, hung back for as long as she could, initially unwilling to approach. The time came for a procession of mourners to march through the space between the coffins before they were taken to the burial site. She moved forward in the line, her dad watching her. She took her place between the caskets as the church choir's soft requiem floated down from the second floor. As AV confronted the display of pink roses over her little sister's casket, her body caved into itself and she briefly sank as if punched in the stomach. Her sweet sister. A whirlwind of energy and silliness. A confidante and a comfort. A best friend. Gone. Her gentle mother. Her biggest cheerleader and strongest advocate. A model of resilience, kindness and generosity. Gone, too. AV exhaled and sank her head into the bed of pale white flowers on top of her mom's casket. A tiny sob. Pianissimo. The next month brought her first-ever school dance. A family friend, Lolita Gegeshidze, 12, did her hair for the occasion. 'Trust the process,' Lolita said as steam billowed from the giraffe-print hair straightener in her bedroom in Highland, Maryland, as SZA, Mitski and other popular artists played from a cellphone speaker. While Lolita beautified AV, the girls snacked on a family-size bag of sour gummy candy, chatted about internet gossip tangentially related to the Kardashians and squealed with laughter as the conversation meandered. 'Do you know what an occipital lobe is?' Lolita asked AV out of nowhere. 'I could not tell you,' AV responded. 'I could start yapping about math, though.' They debriefed about the concerto competition. Lolita wasn't there, but she saw a short TikTok video of it that had amassed 1.6 million views. She was in awe of her friend's talent. 'The only thing I can play on piano is like Christmas songs,' Lolita said, curling the ends of AV's long brown locks with a flourish. Olivia would normally be the one doing AV's hair, probably adorning it with clips and her wrists and neck with jewelry for the dance. 'She liked everything kind of fancy,' AV said, giggling, her silver braces interlaced with bright blue rubber bands. 'She would make it so extra.' Soon after, the piano tuner came to the Ter home. AV had broken three more strings. Chopin and Tchaikovsky traded places with Rachmaninoff in her brain, offering welcome distractions. A week after the dance, she paced anxiously around a practice room at the Levine campus. Brian Ganz, an award-winning pianist who had played with orchestras across the world, was teaching a master class that night, and AV was performing for him for some feedback. Ganz stopped by Levine's small venue around 7 p.m. He absorbed AV's performance as she played Chopin's Ballade No. 3. 'Your playing is very beautiful,' Ganz told AV after she finished her piece. 'There's such tenderness. There's such love in your playing.' But he was there to help her improve, so he scanned the sheet music for disparities between the marks on the page and the sounds AV was creating with the instrument. She started the piece a second time. As Ganz peered down at her through thick glasses perched on the middle of his nose, the problem came to him. He stopped her. 'He follows this with a rest,' Ganz said of Chopin, pointing at the sheet music with the eraser on his pencil. 'I think you want to really observe that. Allow that interesting absence of an arrival [of notes] to be heard rather than to pedal through.' She nodded and played several more phrases. He stopped her again. 'What do we have there?' Ganz asked, referencing a symbol on the page. 'We have a 32nd rest, right? Make that audible.' AV had gotten used to filling the silent, empty spaces in her life since the crash. The activities, practice sessions and lessons were a comfort. It was impossible to know what might collect in the moments of rest. And she didn't want to find out. But Ganz offered a counterpoint. 'Let us hear that rest,' he said, smiling. 'The silences are where most of the music takes place.' The family tackled a new milestone in April: their first big trip since the crash. The Ters went to Florida every year, but never without Olesya and Olivia. As AV, her dad and her uncle traveled down the coast, they sang along to songs in the car and stopped at a McDonald's drive-through, they later recounted. The dissonance between old and new life started transforming into a kind of harmony. At South Beach in the Miami area, AV stood in the ocean water, wiggled her toes in the sand and pointed her face toward the sun. In an alternate universe, her mom and sister would have been floating on either side of her, she said. This moment was different. It was quieter. Olivia's giggles were replaced by a seagull cawing. Instead of Olesya's voice, there was the gentle sound of waves lapping onto the shore. The sunlight warmed her skin. For a moment, there was peace. Even without them.
Telegraph
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
UK's favourite piece of classical music revealed
The UK's favourite piece of classical music has been revealed. Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 2 has been voted the nation's favourite piece of classical music for the third consecutive year, according to the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame. The concerto topped the poll, with 90,000 votes from members of the public, beating popular favourites such as Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No 5 and John Williams' theme to Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List. The Russian-born composer finished his piano concerto in 1901 after struggling with depression, and dedicated the piece to Nikolai Dahl, his doctor. Its second movement was the inspiration behind Eric Carmen's All By Myself , which was sung by Celine Dion in 1996 and used in the 2001 film Bridget Jones's Diary. Sir Karl Jenkins, the Welsh composer, came second with The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace – his highest ranking in the chart. The piece came in at number four last year. The song was originally dedicated to victims of the Kosovo war, and Sir Karl said: 'I'm honoured and humbled that The Armed Man has reached its highest ever position in the Classic FM Hall Of Fame 2025, particularly as I look at all the great masters, past and present, that sit on this list with me. 'With 2025 marking the 25th anniversary of The Armed Man, I'm delighted that this piece has found resonance globally with so many of you over the years. 'I regret to say that there has been no let-up in war and conflict since I dedicated the piece to the victims of Kosovo, but we continue to make music in remembrance of those who have fallen, and in the hope that humanity can find a way to heal.' Schindler's List was the highest ranking film score this year, coming in at number 11, two places ahead of Howard Shore's Lord of the Rings. The soundtracks for Jurassic Park, Star Wars and Harry Potter also featured in the Hall of Fame but failed to make the top 20. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart remains the nation's most popular composer, with over 13 entries, followed by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who overtook Beethoven and Johann Sebastian Bach. There were a growing number of entries from modern composers this year, including Ludovico Einaudi, the Italian pianist, with five entries. The results were announced by Dan Walker, the presenter of Classic FM Breakfast, who said: 'Every year, the Classic FM Hall Of Fame provides a fascinating insight into the nation's favourite classical music and how those music tastes are changing, and this year – the 30th Hall Of Fame – is no exception. 'It is wonderful that Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No 2 tops the poll once again – cementing its place as a timeless masterpiece, which appeals across the generations. 'It's also exciting to see the growing popularity of film music, with 37 entries this year, and increased recognition for modern and living composers. Names like Ludovico Einaudi, Phamie Gow, and, of course, the legendary Sir Karl Jenkins are climbing up the chart, showcasing how classical music keeps evolving at the same time as honouring the greats.'
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Rachmaninoff: The Last Great Romantic
IN THE 1965 MOVIE DOCTOR ZHIVAGO, based on Boris Pasternak's novel, a musical enthusiast and an ever-so-knowing medical professor exchange opinions on a piano piece being played at a swank Christmas party. 'But Boris, this is genius,' the lady swoons. Her companion, who can't take any more, replies, 'Really? I thought it was Rachmaninoff. I'm going for a smoke.'1 Already in the last sweet days that Russia's haute bourgeoisie enjoyed before the Great War and the Revolution ended civilized life there, Sergei Rachmaninoff was an equivocal figure, whose stunning popularity made his accomplishment suspect among the cognoscenti. The seismic transformation of the musical landscape in the intervening century has left his reputation all the more vexed and uncertain—although perhaps, with his popularity no longer clouding our vision, we can now better judge his musical achievements on their merits. In her 2023 book Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile, English music critic Fiona Maddocks leaves no doubt that Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) belongs to the ranks of the excellent—not only as a composer, but also as a pianist, and most impressively as a courageous, generous, and warm-hearted man. She suggests how much was lost when Rachmaninoff, in his prime at 44, left Russia behind for good in December 1917 and struck out for the West and freedom—first Sweden and Denmark for nearly a year, then America, where he arrived just as the Armistice did and in the midst of the influenza pandemic. His personal material losses receive Maddocks's compassionate attentiveness: 'He left behind many members of his family, his fortune, his apartment in Moscow, the estate of Ivanovka, his land, his horses, the trees he had planted, the lilacs he loved, his pianos, his personal belongings, the world he knew and loved.' Such sorrows, if mostly on a smaller scale, were the lot of multitudes who were fortunate enough to depart Russia and the various colonies of the twentieth-century Soviet empire while they still had the chance. Some of those whom Rachmaninoff left behind registered their displeasure: 'You abandoned Russia,' wrote Anton Chekhov's widow, the actress and musician Olga Knipper-Chekhova, in a 1918 New Year's letter, barely able to contain her anger and dismay, hoping there was still a chance he'd come back where he belonged when things settled down. Share THERE WOULD BE NO GOING BACK. The Revolution had befouled Russian life beyond all hope of cleansing. Rachmaninoff would recollect, 'I saw with terrible clearness that here was the beginning of the end—an end full of horrors the occurrence of which was merely a matter of time. The anarchy around me, the brutal uprooting of all the foundations of art, the senseless destruction of all means for its encouragement, left no hope of a normal life in Russia.' The homeland held no refuge from 'this witches' Sabbath,' although for a time Rachmaninoff was so absorbed in the work of revising his First Piano Concerto that even tuning out the ever-present revolutionary street violence, 'which turned the existence of a non-proletarian into hell on earth, was comparatively easy for me. I sat at the writing table or the piano all day without troubling about the rattle of machine guns and rifle-shots. I would have greeted any intruder with the answer that Archimedes gave the conquerors of Syracuse.' (According to legend, the Syracusan polymath, deep in geometric speculation, oblivious to the Roman conquest of his city then underway, told the soldier who had come to present him before the invaders' commander, 'Do not disturb my circles.' The soldier, understandably annoyed, struck the uncooperative genius dead on the spot.) Clearly Rachmaninoff did well to get out of Russia while the getting was good. Aesthetic raptures were a dangerous proposition in the heyday of Soviet Man. The list of those artists murdered outright, driven to suicide, or gradually frightened to death by Lenin or Stalin and their apparatchiks is a roll of honor—poets such as Osip Mandelstam, Nikolai Gumilev, and Daniil Kharms, and writer Isaac Babel, Marina Tsvetayeva, and theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. The extraordinary defiant poet Anna Akhmatova and the great composers Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich managed to survive Stalinism, but she was forbidden publication for much of her life and the two musicians were harried into at least the appearance of conformity with socialist artistic prescriptions. Share Rachmaninoff's parents lacked the means to establish him in a military career like his father's; when at age 10 he won a scholarship to the St. Petersburg Conservatory, the way was prepared for an assault upon all available musical glory. There would, however, be delays on the glory road: his inclination to laziness and truancy, exacerbated by grief over the deaths of his two sisters and the separation of his parents, led to his academic failure at St. Petersburg. A second chance, in Moscow, had a happier result. On his final exams Tchaikovsky himself 'added a plus sign to the highest mark available, 5.' Surviving intermittent periods of depression, self-doubt, and creative barrenness, Rachmaninoff established his musical reputation in Russia with works such as his Second Piano Concerto and his Prelude in C# minor (the latter written when he was 19 and still a student) gaining him widespread acclaim and entrée into rarefied social circles. He was also in demand as a conductor, leading the forces at the Bolshoi Theater and other grand venues, in music that ranged from Borodin and Mussorgsky to Berlioz, Bizet, Haydn, Debussy, and Richard Strauss; and he performed his own works and others' at the piano. In leaving Russia permanently in 1918, Rachmaninoff deliberately cut himself off from the most splendid and most enduring part of his musical vocation: no longer primarily a composer, he would stake his and his family's future on his talents as a pianist. Fortunately, these were superb; many who know about such matters think him the foremost keyboard virtuoso of the century. Like most every immigrant fresh off the boat, he needed to make a living in the new world in a hurry, and accustomed as he was to the comforts of prosperity, that meant earning enough to afford lots of the best of everything. Rachmaninoff was already acquainted somewhat with the life of an itinerant performing artist. For the 1909–10 musical season, he had ventured to the United States, where among many engagements he had played his Third Piano Concerto in New York with Gustav Mahler conducting. Before long he commanded top dollar. In 1920 he signed up with the Victor Talking Machine Company, agreeing to record twenty-five pieces over five years, for an ironclad annual advance against royalties of $15,000, or some $225,000 in today's money. RCA Victor would supplement his income from performing, teaching, and composing for many years, though he had to fight off nerves in the recording studio that he did not feel in the concert hall. The unsettling thought of permanence—performing for the ages—bedeviled this most fastidious of artists, who could not stand the possibility that some imperfection might ruin his performance for all to hear, world without end. Join now For live performance Rachmaninoff would assume an air of mandarin imperturbability. He earned that formidable demeanor. The slothful practice habits of his youth were laid to rest, as he prepared with the utmost diligence, worked to expand his repertoire, and played in public every chance he had. For his first season following his return to America in late 1918, he agreed to twenty-five recitals as a solo pianist. In addition, the temporary absence of the Polish master Ignacy Paderewski, who took a break from performing from 1919 to 1921 to serve as the prime minister and foreign minister of the Polish republic, newly restored from foreign dominion, left Rachmaninoff in command of the concert stage. During that spell he composed only a cadenza for the Second Rhapsody by Liszt. At first the change in activity invigorated him for the work at hand. In an interview for a music magazine he declared that he was in the right place at the right time. 'I am in America at present for the reason that nowhere else in the world is there such music as there is here now. You have the finest orchestras, the most musically appreciative people, and I have more opportunity to hear fine orchestral works, and more opportunity to play.' This great opportunity got to be too much of a good thing, and rather quickly at that. His breakneck schedule—over sixty concerts in 1921–22 and over seventy the following season—ground him down; he required daily electrical therapy for headaches and pains in his hands, and above all he missed composing. To an intimate friend he confessed his unhappiness in 1922: I dislike my occupation intensely. For this whole time I have not composed one line. I only play the piano and give a great many concerts. For four years now I practice, practice. I make some progress but actually the more I play, the more clearly do I see my inadequacies. If I ever learn this business thoroughly, it may be on the eve of my death. Materially I am quite secure. Bourgeois! Two years later, as Rachmaninoff was vacationing in Europe, his friend the émigré composer Nikolai Medtner asked him why he didn't compose anymore, and he answered with a question of his own: 'How can I compose without melody?' America suited his business needs but the creative spontaneity of his soul was balked there. Losing Russia, he had surrendered the essence of his musical gift. The authorities in the motherland treated the fugitive master with open contempt; his semi-serious self-castigating outcry 'Bourgeois!' parodied the boilerplate animadversions of the cultural commissars. Dismissed as a 'reactionary,' he was becoming a musical non-person in the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, in the United States, his refined artistry was being subjected to the blandishments of popular culture at its most piercingly vulgar. Tin Pan Alley hacks, as well as some more respected composers, latched onto his C# minor Prelude and made it peculiarly their own: ragtime, foxtrot, and jazz versions tickled American ears. Maddocks writes, 'After Duke Ellington's jam session was broadcast live from New York's Cotton Club in 1938, the press reported that he had played a swing version of the 'immortal Prelude in C sharp minor,' an old piece written by Rachmaninoff 'in the eighteenth Century.'' Share The Bulwark RACHMANINOFF'S MUSICAL TASTE was rather old-fashioned, if not as antique as that unwitting journalistic gibe suggests. As Maddocks writes, Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann made up his basic repertoire, while he left the emerging—and increasingly established—modernist composers, from Stravinsky to Bartok to Copland, to the ministrations of other pianists. He happened to share this preference for the great Romantics with the leading Russian pianists, as became clear when a tentative political thaw enabled some Soviet artists to appear in the United States. In due course, with the outbreak of the Great Patriotic War, as the traditional monuments of Russian culture were invoked as sources of militant uplift for the masses, Rachmaninoff became respectable in the Soviet Union. At the same time, American critics and certain waspish colleagues were ever more severe in their appraisal of what Maddocks calls, without meaning to cast aspersions, Rachmaninoff's 'retrograde' style. Stravinsky, who was Rachmaninoff's neighbor in Beverly Hills, believed that in his latest works his colleague had 'sold out to the sound of Hollywood,' in Maddocks's words. For Rachmaninoff had broken his long silence and begun writing music again—intermittently but in earnest, and in his familiar Romantic mode. The six works that he wrote in exile between 1926 and 1940 are worthy of the Russian artist who gave us such prerevolutionary masterpieces of high Romanticism as his Second Symphony, Second and Third Piano Concertos, 'All-Night Vigil,' and the one-act opera Francesca da Rimini. Of the six later pieces, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934), Symphony no. 3 in A minor (1936), and Symphonic Dances (1940) are especially strong. His early successes and his final ones are of a piece. Rachmaninoff's sound world was ever the arena of extravagant extremes, where intense feeling is everything; and that means exploiting the full resources of his melodic gift is his principal concern. Striking dynamic contrasts and sudden variability in tempo shape his emotional highs and lows. Orchestral storms of hectic magnificence all but disappear into silence as flamboyant crescendos give way to equally histrionic diminuendos, songful flights accelerating almost wildly yield to languorous rallentandos, and these lovely long phrases in turn diminish in length and volume to collapse into weary resignation, from which ardent hopes are slowly built once more, the volatile suffering Russian soul passing through all the Stations of the Cross on the way to Resurrection time and again. Maddocks cites the composer's fondness for 'upward-sweeping' passages, while the critic Michael Steinberg has the same passages in mind when he praises Rachmaninoff's 'expansive' music. One might further call such melodic genius magniloquent: the gift of sheer beauty unabashed by accusations of wretched excess from those who do not want to understand. The power of beautiful melody is at the heart of Rachmaninoff's music, which he sets in defiant opposition to the modernist preference for provoking aural uneasiness and even inducing pain. He is unique in his time. Gustav Mahler shares Rachmaninoff's penchant for the gorgeous and ravishing, but Mahler also turns grotesquerie or ugliness to his own purposes, inserting bits of klezmer music or popular tunes such as Frère Jacques hard by the most exquisite or sublime melodies. Mahler wants to create music that takes in everything, while Rachmaninoff's reach is shorter by comparison, his exorbitance of feeling constrained by the vocabulary and syntax of his illustrious Romantic predecessors, which do not admit the twentieth century's expressionist grimacing, scratching the itch to expose the most tormented and disturbing aspects of the modern psychic underside. Rachmaninoff wanted to recreate the world as it once was. He was the last of the great Romantic composers. Fortunately, there are still pianists and conductors and listeners and critics such as Fiona Maddocks who partake of the same nature and who ensure that this stupendous throwback remains vital and vigorous. Share 1 In Goodbye Russia, Fiona Maddocks retails this Zhivago bit and adds a kicker: 'Pasternak, a musician himself, was more of a Scriabin man.'
Yahoo
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Philharmonic to perform final concert in annual Symphonic Series
BINGHAMTON, N.Y. (WIVT/WBGH) – The Binghamton Philharmonic Orchestra is taking audience members on a journey through the musical landscapes of Finland and Russia as it raps up an annual concert series. The Philharmonic is presenting 'In the Beginning' on March 29 at 7:30 p.m. at the Broome County Forum Theatre. The final concert of the orchestra' 2024-2025 Symphonic Series is led by Music Director Maestro Daniel Hege and focuses on the natural and spiritual realms of the far North. According to the Philharmonic, the three composers featured in the program are among the most significant in twentieth-century classical music. The orchestra will be playing the compositions of Einojuhani Rautavaara, Jean Sibelius, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Pianist Andrew Russo is returning to the Philharmonic as soloist in the Rachmaninoff concerto. Audience members are invited to a free pre-concert lecture by the Philharmonic's Director of Education and Community Engagement, 'The Musical Politics of Nostalgia,' about the ways that nationalism and exile informed the music of Sibelius and Rachmaninoff. The pre-concert lecture will be held in the Forum Theatre's Recital Hall at 6:30pm. Tickets to the show are between $28 to $69. Kids 17 and under can attend for free, thanks to Symphonic Series Sponsor M&T Bank. For more information, contact the Binghamton Philharmonic Box Office at (607)723-3931 or visit Senator Webb honors local women during Women's History Month Philharmonic to perform final concert in annual Symphonic Series Sunshine briefly returns this afternoon Binghamton Boy's Basketball wins Class AA State Title in 2OT Thriller Steuben County Sheriff's Deputy arrested on child sex abuse materials charge Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Russia Today
18-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Russia Today
How Rachmaninoff's manuscript became a reason for cooperation between Russia and US
Russian Music Publishing is preparing to release a unique scholarly edition: The autograph manuscript of the Second Symphony by the Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. The digital copy of the manuscript, long considered lost, was entrusted to the publishing house by American art collector and philanthropist Robert Owen Lehman Jr. The return of this rare document to Russia took 20 years. Experts believe that the Second Symphony occupies a central place in Rachmaninoff's oeuvre. It was composed in 1907-1908, when the composer lived with his family in Dresden after two successful seasons as conductor at the Moscow Bolshoi Theater. The premiere of the symphony took place in January 1908 at the Mariinsky Theater under Rachmaninoff's direction and was a tremendous success. The author held his work to exceptionally high standards. His First Symphony failed in 1897 and resulted in a serious moral trial for the composer. Rachmaninoff wrote: 'After this Symphony, I did not compose anything for about three years. I was like a man who had a stroke and whose head and arms were taken away for a long time... I will not show the Symphony, and I will impose a ban on its performance in my will.' The autograph manuscript of the Second Symphony was considered lost for many decades until it unexpectedly resurfaced in 2004 at a Sotheby's auction. The appearance of the manuscript, which had been kept by an anonymous European collector, surprised not only music researchers but also the heir of the great composer – his grandson Alexandre Rachmaninoff, who lived in Switzerland. He intended to sue the owners in order to prove that they had no rights to possess the score. However, Rachmaninoff was stopped by Dmitry Dmitriev, the head of Russian Music Publishing. At the time, work was in full swing at Russian Music Publishing on the 'Sergei Rachmaninoff. Critical Edition of the Complete Works (RCW)'. 'The value lies in the fact that the autograph manuscripts of Rachmaninoff conceal an unknown and unpublished Rachmaninoff, which the global music community has yet to hear. In other words, this is effectively a kind of rediscovery,' Dmitriev says. He explained the importance of the RCW to the grandson of the great Rachmaninoff, too. Alexandre Rachmaninoff dedicated many years to promoting the works of his genius grandfather, organizing festivals and competitions in his name, and supporting young, talented musicians. When he – an attorney by profession – learned that the original manuscript of one of Rachmaninoff's most famous works was being sold at auction for an exorbitant price, he found himself, to put it mildly, in a predicament. According to Dmitriev, it took considerable effort to dissuade the composer's descendant from withdrawing the lot from the auction and filing a lawsuit: the owners could simply have chosen to 'go underground' with the precious document. Dmitriev describes the appearance of the autograph manuscript at the auction as a fantastic stroke of luck. 'It really took a lot of diplomatic effort for me to persuade Alexandre Rachmaninoff not to withdraw the autograph from the auction, so that this lot would remain. He called me and began to express his outrage very emotionally about how this could happen; he wanted to sue, get it back, immediately impose fines, and so on,' Dmitriev recounts. 'We quickly understood that such a mood could be fatal in terms of potentially losing this unique autograph for another 50 or even 80 years.' The arguments of the head of Russian Music Publishing had an effect. Alexandre agreed to leave the lot at the auction with a number of legal stipulations and reached a settlement with its owners. Sotheby's reclassified the auction as closed, and the score was sold to the Tabor Foundation for £800,000, with the obligation to deposit it at the British Library in London and provide access to researchers. It seemed that the autograph manuscript of the Second Symphony would finally see the light of day. No one could have predicted then that it would again remain hidden from scholars for many years. According to the description from the Sotheby's website, the autograph manuscript of the Second Edition indeed represents a priceless find for scholars. The well-preserved 320-page document (only the first four pages and part of the last one are missing) provides a complete understanding of the original orchestration. Dmitriev explains that the Tabor Foundation needed the document only as an investment asset, acquired for subsequent resale. The risk of potential digital copies being disseminated threatened to diminish the uniqueness of the manuscript – and consequently, its potential value at future auctions. Therefore, the score was displayed to the public during events and exhibitions at the British Library, while at other times it remained in its closed collections. All that researchers were able to study were a few pages of the autograph, digitized for the preparation of the lot's booklet at Sotheby's. 'Alexandre Rachmaninoff approached them with a request, and the British Library reached out to management – but to no avail. They exhibited the autograph manuscript at some showings, but there was absolutely no access for researchers,' Dmitriev explains. 'That was really very difficult, and in the end, we completely despaired.' Original music works are very rarely put up for sale and cost a fortune. For example, in December 2024, Christie's presented a collection of musical manuscripts by Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, Verdi, Puccini, Ravel, Strauss, Mendelssohn, and Debussy. Beethoven's autograph sketch leaf for the string quartet in C, op. 59 no. 3. was the most expensive lot: Its preliminary estimate ranged from £100,000 to £150,000. Ultimately, the document was sold for £113,000. In 2016, an anonymous buyer acquired the original of Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2 at Sotheby's for £4.5 million. Guinness World Records featured this document as the most expensive musical manuscript sold at auction. 'The autograph manuscript is the most authentic source of the text closest to the author,' Dmitriev explains. 'It captures all the details of the author's intent. When handwritten texts are converted into printed form, particularly in music, this leads to what is called 'a moment of interpretation'. A lot of changes are made during the process of translating handwritten text into printed form. Many details of the original text are overlooked, and many nuances are standardized. Thus, two different texts emerge. For this reason, any autograph – regardless if it's Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, or Rachmaninoff – commands such high prices. Because it is essentially the only medium that preserves the original authorial text.' It is not surprising that such auctions attract enormous attention – and sometimes even end in scandals. In 2016, Sotheby's failed to sell a Beethoven manuscript (with a pre-sale estimate of £200,000) after Professor Barry Cooper from the University of Manchester claimed that the document was penned not by the composer himself, but by a copyist. Not until 2014 did the autograph manuscript of the Second Symphony reappear at auction. It happened after the death of Alexandre Rachmaninoff. The document was sold for £1.2 million to American collector Robert Owen Lehman Jr. The art collection assembled by the Lehman family is considered one of the finest private collections in the US. The autograph manuscript of the Second Symphony was placed on deposit at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York. However, unlike previous owners, Lehman chose to share the precious document with the world. Despite the rising 'cancel culture' against Russian art over the Ukraine conflict, Lehman decided to provide Russian Music Publishing with a digital copy of the manuscript for study, transcription, and preparation of the first scholarly edition. Dmitriev describes Lehman's action as a unique example of interstate cooperation. 'Such precedents show that in any country there are people – of any citizenship and nationality – who are able to communicate not in the language of ultimatums and who remain human.' Lehman became interested in the project of 'Sergei Rachmaninoff. Critical Edition of the Complete Works'. 'We had already sent him three volumes, and he had the opportunity to get familiar with the project,' Dmitriev says. 'We should be grateful to our colleagues from the British Library, who accurately told him the whole story.' The RCW has received broad recognition in the global music community as the first and only scholarly edition of the works of the great Russian composer. Its volumes are used in the study of music textual criticism at Cambridge University as a standard for preparing source-based editions for modern scholarly publications. Rachmaninoff's sheet music archive is considered to be well-preserved – the majority of his works have survived to the present day in the form of clean autograph manuscripts and lifetime editions, with corrections made by the author himself. However, Rachmaninoff left Russia in 1917, so his documents ended up scattered across libraries, museums, archives, and private collections in Russia, the US, and Europe. 'He did not intend to emigrate; he planned to return. He left all of his autographs, entire works, in his Moscow apartment. He even left what he was currently working on,' Dmitriev says. 'For him, Russia remained his homeland. During the Great Patriotic War, he helped the Red Army more than anyone else in our émigré community. He did it with all his heart, and he was on our side; he was with the people.' Scientific work is impossible without a deep investigation of the creative process, according to Dmitriev. 'Scholars attempt to reconstruct what was going through the composer's mind, how the composer wrote his works. There are different types of creative processes. For example, Bach and Beethoven followed the principle 'from simple to complex': a simpler version of the piece was written first, some sketches, and then it became more and more complex.' Rachmaninoff, however, worked in a completely different way. Dmitriev says the composer deviated from general principles because his creative process was absolutely unique. Rachmaninoff had a phenomenal creative memory. A large part of his creative work in composing music occurred in his creative memory. He would write it down on paper only when it was necessary to pass it to the publisher. 'The most interesting part began when Rachmaninoff started performing his own works at premieres: the pianist Rachmaninoff would come into play, starting to correct the composer Rachmaninoff – reducing, simplifying the texture, cutting out individual sections. We have very distinctive creativity here, where, unlike other composers for whom we must publish the final versions, we need to publish the initial ones.' Russian Music Publishing received high-quality digital copies, allowing scholars to examine the Second Symphony autograph manuscript in great detail. Currently, the challenging effort is underway to transcribe it. Dmitriev believes that the return of the document to Russia was made possible thanks to unique international cooperation, which is particularly important to maintain during times of political disagreements. 'For those working in the field of culture, collaboration is very important. Even when politicians cannot find common ground, such dialogue can still take place within cultural interactions, and this is very important,' he says.
