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In 1918, Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff found himself as a 45-year-old musician in exile. He left Russia behind as he saw the chaos of the February and October Revolutions sweep the nation from monarchy to communism. He brought his whole family, some cash, clothes and music with him. The journey itself is its own story. When he moved to the United States, he had to switch careers from that of a composer to a travelling concert pianist. By the end of the First World War, his music was considered passe, so the career switch was needed to put food on the table; it did work out in the end as he managed to live luxuriously albeit not fully acclimated to the United States —he recreated the feel of his estate in Ivanovka when he was in New York, and he was reluctant to speak English.
Fortunately, his abilities as a pianist made the career change possible. He possessed a superb technique that he had inherited from his teachers like Nikolai Zverev and Alexander Siloti, the latter being his cousin and a student of Franz Liszt. What also came in handy was his phenomenal memory, which allowed him to play back a piece he heard once, then keeping it in his memory for later use. There was a story that one time, Siloti gave his cousin Brahms’s fiendishly difficult Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel to learn; the young Rachmaninoff managed to learn the whole thing in two weeks with “complete artistic finish”. When he became a concert pianist, the repertoire he had to prepare was not exactly extensive since he usually prepared his own works for concerts, not to mention he had to prepare them in short order for the demanding and extensive schedule. He toured around the United States and also in Europe, taking summers off at his villa in Switzerland to compose —he only managed to compose six works owing to his busy schedule and homesickness. Another thing that made his piano playing the stuff of legend was his unusually large hands that could span a 13th (!) on the keyboard —even when playing Mozart, his articulation was as crisp as anyone with smaller hands.
We are also fortunate that he left recordings for us —recordings of himself playing his own works and selections from other composers like Beethoven, Liszt, and Chopin. As mentioned prior, he did not have a big repertoire and we could only wish he recorded more —he did not leave recordings of any of the Beethoven piano sonatas, etudes by Chopin or Liszt, or even his other works like the etudes-tableaux or his two piano sonatas. Another loss for us was that he did not live long enough to record using stereo —much of the recordings we have are from piano rolls and phonographs. Recently, Telarc released a remastered version of some of these recordings in two volumes titled A Window in Time, wherein Rachmaninoff recorded some of his works in one volume, and selections by Chopin, Schubert, Tchaikovsky et al in the other. Remastered recordings of his piano concertos are also available on streaming services. Had Rachmaninoff lived into the 50 or 60s and had his technique still well polished, we may have had captured even more of the fine details that made his playing legendary. Another unfortunate thing for us was that there is no film of him in performance that would have captured him in action —there were some recordings of live performances that were recently discovered, perhaps recorded without his knowledge and kept from the public until then.
As a pianist, when Rachmaninoff played works by other composers, he treated them as if they were his own, placing his ideas into them that created really interesting effects. His playing was always clear with a quality akin to singing. Sometimes, it feels like he deviates from the score but when one listens closely, his musical decisions may make sense. They feel improvisatory, but they are not since Rachmaninoff clearly plans out how he plays the piece. They may seem extreme by today’s standards of playing that seek so much fidelity to the score, but Rachmaninoff made it work.
Here is Rachmaninoff playing some of his own preludes:
Here is Rachmaninoff playing Chopin’s Ballade in A flat, Op, 47: