25-05-2025
Classical music shouldn't just comfort – it should challenge, too
Today, all too often, classical music is used like aural wallpaper or a warm bath – whether by radio stations or by film and television producers. As a result, pieces that do not fit into that category are increasingly neglected, sought out only by that shrinking minority with serious intellectual curiosity.
Mention Rachmaninov, for example, and most people think only of the piano concertos, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, the Vespers and, perhaps, the Second Symphony. Yet a new recording from Chandos of his First Symphony, performed by the Sinfonia of London under the baton of John Wilson, reminds us of the utter genius of this too little known work; a piece we very nearly did not have at all.
Rachmaninov is, in many ways, the musical heir to Tchaikovsky, whom he idolised. After his hero died in 1893, when Rachmaninov was just 20, he started to struggle with composition for the first time. But in January 1895, inspired by chants he had heard in a Russian Orthodox church service, he began to write his First Symphony. His fluency returned, and by the following September he had completed it. He waited anxiously for the premiere, which eventually took place in St Petersburg in March 1897. It was a catastrophe.
Much of the blame for this went to Glazunov, who conducted it. He under-rehearsed the orchestra in an unfamiliar work situated for the most part in a sound-world new to them and their audience. Despite its homage to Tchaikovsky and its use of conventional symphonic form, the piece was unquestionably progressive in the context of its times. Also, Glazunov was an alcoholic and, according to the testimony of Rachmaninov's wife, was drunk at the premiere.
An elderly and reactionary critic felt it was a depiction of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Perhaps worst of all, the composer himself was disappointed, unable in his despair to distinguish between the pitiful performance Glazunov had elicited from his orchestra and the unvoiced genius of the work.
Rachmaninov sank into despair, and a few months later had what would probably now be termed a nervous breakdown. Until 1900, he found it impossible to compose anything more. Miraculously, he did not throw the score into the fire, or, as he threatened he would do, tear it up; he is even said in around 1908 to have considered revising it, following the successful reception of his Second Symphony, but did not. However, when he left Russia in 1917, he did not bother to take his First Symphony score with him, telling a friend that he would never again let anyone see, let alone hear it – and for decades the symphony simply disappeared.
The manuscript itself literally vanished, never to be seen again. Rachmaninov had locked it in a desk in his flat in Moscow. The key passed into the care of his ex-housekeeper, who enabled the movement of his manuscripts to a museum in Moscow: but this one was not among them.
By a stroke of luck, in 1944, the year after his death and at the end of the siege of what had become Leningrad, the orchestral parts from the only performance were rediscovered in the library of that city's conservatoire. Under the direction of Gauk, a leading Russian conductor, scholars reassembled the work: and in October 1945, 48 years after its debut, the First Symphony had its second performance.
The ignorance of the first critics was instantly apparent and the symphony was soon being performed all over the world, not simply because of the huge fame Rachmaninov had secured by that time, but because it was realised what an inherently great work it was. It remains in the repertoire and Wilson's indispensable recording is but the latest by many great conductors, including Ashkenazy, Ormandy and Previn.
Inevitably, like almost all of the composer's music, it has found itself cannibalised by television: readers of a certain age will recognise in the commanding martial theme that opens the finale (and which Wilson has his orchestra play with particular force) the music that, in the 1960s, used to open the BBC's Panorama. Wilson's new recording is wanting in nothing, and for those who do not know this outstanding symphony, presents the perfect opportunity to become acquainted with it.
