Inaccessible, romantic, almost pop: Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos

Before launching its new symphonic season, the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia takes a virtual trip to Russia with a series of three concerts (next week: on the 21st, 24th and 27th, at 8.30 pm) dedicated to the complete works for piano and orchestra by Rachmaninoff. The protagonists are two Russian musicians, conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky and pianist Nikolaj Luganskij, with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia bringing to life a project that also includes a recording for Harmonia Mundi. When heard in sequence, the four concertos paint a less predictable portrait of Rachmaninoff than the individual concertos manage to offer. The Second and Third, in particular, represent both the strength and the downfall of the Russian composer: over-exposure and a certain pop-culture fame ultimately wear even his masterpieces down. The First and Fourth, on the other hand, are unjustly consigned to obscurity, and the reason is not merely that they are less popular.

These are also the two concertos that demand the most, from the orchestra no less than from the soloist; music that is learnt through practice, as well as through study and talent, rather like Mozart in Austro-German orchestras or Debussy in French ones. Not everyone likes Rachmaninoff, after all – not even performers and conductors – and that is a legitimate matter of taste. This writer resents the overuse of these works in concert seasons, or the fact that the composer of these concertos is the forbidden dream of students (who often struggle to play even the opening theme of the Third properly). Not to mention the links with cinema: the Second Concerto accompanies the most intense scene in Brief Encounter, reappears in When the Wife Is Away, but above all its best-known melody, reworked, ended up in Eric Carmen’s All by Myself, the song that Bridget Jones sings to herself in the living room with a bottle of wine in her hand. It is a tune that everyone whistles but few still listen to in its entirety, and this is both its glory and its downfall. The Third, on the other hand, became the centrepiece of a full-length film: Shine, directed by Scott Hicks in 1996 and starring Geoffrey Rush, inspired by the true story of the Australian pianist David Helfgott, makes it the very driving force of the plot, and it is there that the myth of the ‘most difficult piece in the world’ was born. A fictionalised story, yet one capable of rightfully restoring the score to the repertoires of great performers. Very few, in truth, have tackled the complete set: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Mikhail Pletnev, Stephen Hough, and Rachmaninoff himself. Then there are the absentees, who speak volumes: Maurizio Pollini, Radu Lupu and András Schiff have never performed these concertos. Among the Italians are Beatrice Rana and Francesco Libetta; among the foreigners, Martha Argerich; but none of the three has performed the complete set.

The most paradoxical case, however, remains that of the Fourth: the concerto least loved by the public is also the one that attracted one of the most demanding performers of the century, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, who played almost nothing else by Rachmaninoff. It is not a piece designed for concert-hall success; if anything, it is a more intimate diary, and perhaps it is precisely this that continues to captivate pianists less inclined towards easy acclaim. Aaron Copland, who had no fondness for Rachmaninoff, dismissed listening to his symphonies and concertos as an endurance test, wondering what purpose all those notes served. It is the question that this series will attempt to answer.