Doing Rachmaninov like they did in the bad old days
Album Of The WeekFrom the Lebrecht Album of the Week:
If you think Rachmaninov’s second symphony is easy to play, you should have heard the mush one of London’s top orchestras made of it recently under a famous conductor who has performed it all his life. There is a fine line to walk in this symphony between sentiment and passion, assertiveness and overblown bombast, explicitness and allusion.
Two recordings, just landed, exemplify these contrasts…
Read on here.
And here.
Sorry, Rach symphony 2 is indefensible, beneath all potential contempt, and unlistenable, to boot.
Love PC2 to pieces.
What an ignorant comment. You cannot be serious.
Have you lost your mind? Rachmaninoff’s Op. 27 is as fine a contribution to symphonic art as was ever crafted. It is a masterpiece of the highest order.
Satire, presumably.
Rachmaninoff didn’t pursue his career as a solo concert pianist until after the first world war – when he was 45 years old, permanently exiled from Russia, and needed to create an immediate and steady income stream.
Looking at the photo reminds me of the risk factors associated with a first-cousin marriage like they did in the bad old days. One of SR’s daughters and his grand daughter died rather young. There’s a DVD of Ormandy conducting the 2nd symphony and includes a bonus interview of the conductor talking about his experience working with the composer. Ormandy tells the story of asking Rachmaninoff if he would allow a cut to be made in the music and SR replies, “all of you conductors are like Shylock, you love to cut, cut, cut!” Ormandy always conducted the work with a cut.
Rachmaninoff himself recorded “Isle of the Dead” and the 3rd Piano Concerto with cuts – in the case of the latter, massive ones.
His last 1973 recording for RCA is complete.The DVD(from 1979) has some cuts,but much less than in his previous recordings….The first recording without cuts was Andre Previn´s second recording on EMI from 1973…Even Previn made some small cuts in his first ,RCA recording…
Not exactly. The honors of the first uncut recording of Rachmaninoff’s second symphony belongs to Paul Kletzki, whose 1968 recording with L’Orchestre de la Suisse Romande is still considered legendary.
Occasional one off first cousin marriage is of trivial genetic interest, that’s why it’s becoming increasingly popular and legal, the science has been there for decades..
Growing up in south GA it was tough to find a good selection of recordings as stores really didn’t stock much classical music.
Finding VOX boxes of Saint Louis Semkow and Schumann, Slatkin and Rachmaninov – I loved the sounds of that group! Some excellent Copland, too!
The John Wilson recording offers infinitely more detail,colors,muscular rhythm,and,yes,swooning portamenti a la Philadelphia in the mid 30s…..Another improvement.
Leonard Slatkin has been consistently very good with Rachmaninoff’s orchestral music. His more recent Rachy recordings from Detroit are no less exceptional (Naxos). He particularly excels with the “Symphonic Dances”.
Stokowski was working on and studying the score to the Rach #2 but did not feel well the day of the scheduled recording so it was postponed. And then he died so we are deprived of what might have been. Probably a mix of the wonderful and the outrageous.
There is a Stokowski broadcast recording from 1946 with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony….Heavily cut,and musically often bad.
Very happy end eager to hear these Vox remastering. The sound of their CD edition in the 80s and 90s was hideous, but when you listen to some Japanese Columbia CDs, it’s like a miracle and music speaks again, hopefully will be the same…
“the young Slatkin, raised in 1930s Hollywood where Rachmaninov lived”
I mean, Slatkin surely is no teenager anymore, but raised in the 1930s? Sounds about twenty years too early.
All this even more true when discussing the famous piano concertos.. Rach foolishly thought making his own recordings might head off expressions of gross sentimentality.. But in one lifetime, a tradition of such has developed… An inverse of what has happened to poor Bartok’s piano pieces..