My local orchestra is performing Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances this year, and I thought that I would do a posting of it. The performance below is with Kirill Kondrashin, conducting the Moscow Philharmonic in 1963. It is a very famous recording. The Symphonic Dances was also scored for two pianos, and I have selected a recording by Sergei Babayan and Danil Trifonov. Babayan, formerly at the Cleveland Institute of Music, is now at Julliard and the SMU School of the Arts in Dallas. Trifonov is a virtuoso Russian pianist and composer. It might be insightful to listen to the piano arrangement before listening to the orchestral version. This is the last orchestral piece that Rachmaninoff wrote.
Rachmaninoff/Symphonic Dances
April 1, 1873 – March 28, 1943
The orchestral premiere of what was now called Symphonic Dances took place in Philadelphia in 1941, to great public acclaim. While a bit more conservative than much of his earlier work, there is still an originality and force of expression that is quintessentially Rachmaninoff here.
Rachmaninoff summed up his life as a composer shortly before his death, in Beverly Hills, his final home: “In my own compositions, no conscious effort has been made to be original, or Romantic, or Nationalistic, or anything else. I write down on paper the music I hear within me, as naturally as possible. I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music…. I have been strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov: but I have never, to the best of my knowledge, imitated anyone. What I try to do when writing down my music is to make it say simply and directly that which is in my heart when I am composing. If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes either beautiful or bitter or sad or religious.”
For most of his career Rachmaninoff, also one of the great pianists of his time, was the object of critics’ scorn for remaining stylistically rooted in the 19th century while living in the 20th. At the end of his life, however, with the present Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff combined a modernist rhythmic element—inspired by Stravinsky and Prokofiev—with his own unquenchable penchant for the big, big tune.
The Symphonic Dances had its beginnings as far back as 1915, in sketches for a ballet score called The Scythians (not to be confused with a similarly titled work by Prokofiev) that he submitted to dancer-choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who rejected them as “unballetic.” A quarter-century later, while living on New York’s Long Island, Rachmaninoff resurrected ideas from The Scythians to form the first movement of the Symphonic Dances, premiered in 1941 by its dedicatees, Eugene Ormandy and his Philadelphia Orchestra. The initial reception for what is now widely regarded as Rachmaninoff’s most important symphonic work was lukewarm. The audience wanted more lushness, the critics less. It has since become the darling of critics among the composer’s scores and, increasingly, an audience favorite.
Interestingly, Rachmaninoff, his performers’ capabilities ever in mind, was in the habit of having an accomplished violinist check the practicability of the bowings for all his works involving strings. For the Symphonic Dances, this function was fulfilled by Fritz Kreisler, Rachmaninoff’s frequent recital partner. Since Kreisler considered no violin part too difficult, the score emerged as music for a virtuoso orchestra.