Rachmaninov’s conception of the form is more expansive than Chopin’s, with some preludes amounting to miniature tone-poems, but this tendency became more explicit in the two sets of Études-tableaux (Op.33 and 39), composed between 1911 and 1917. Reviewing an early performance, one Russian critic noted the stylistic evolution that can be detected in these works: ‘In the Études, Rachmaninov appears in a new light. The soft lyricist begins to employ more severe, concentrated and deepened modes of expression.’  

Nigel Simeone

Suite No.1: Fantaisie (Tableaux), Op.5
Vocalise, Op.34 No.14
Suite No.2, Op.17
Symphonic Dances, Op.45
 

When Rachmaninov was a sixteen-year-old student at the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky declared: ‘I predict a great future for him’ and he watched with interest as Rachmaninov’s career developed. At a private soirée in September 1893, Tchaikovsky heard a preview performance (on piano four-hands) of his Pathétique Symphony (a month before its premiere) and that same evening, Rachmaninov showed Tchaikovsky his new Suite for two pianos. It turned out to be their last meeting: by the time Rachmaninov and Pavel Pabst gave the public premiere of the Suite on 30 November 1893, Tchaikovsky was dead. When the work was published the following year, it was headed with a dedication ‘À Monsieur P. Tchaikowsky’. The original title was Fantaisie (Tableaux) pour deux pianos, and in the score, each movement is prefaced by a poem. While working on the piece in June 1893, Rachmaninov had written to a friend that it was ‘a fantasy representing a series of musical pictures.’ Accompanying the opening ‘Barcarolle’ (Allegretto) is a poem by Lermontov that begins: ‘At dusk the chill waves lap gently beneath the gondola’s slow oar’, and ends on a reflective note: ‘time glides over the surge of love; the water will grow smooth again and passion will rise no more.’ For ‘Night…Love’ (Adagio sostenuto), Rachmaninov turned to Byron: the poem beginning ‘It is the hour when from the boughs the nightingale’s high note is heard.’ The third movement is a lament (Largo di molto) entitled ‘Tears’, accompanied by Fyodor Tyutchev’s poem beginning ‘Tears, human tears, you flow both early and late.’ The finale is ‘Easter’ (Allegro maestoso), a musical evocation of Aleksey Khomyakov’s words: ‘Across the earth a mighty bell is ringing … exulting in that holy victory.’  

The Vocalise was first written in 1915 for wordless soprano voice and piano, but Rachmaninov himself soon made orchestral arrangements (with and without voice) and others followed, including a solo piano arrangement by Alexander Siloti (1921) and several different transcriptions for piano four-hands. This short piece found Rachmaninov on inspired form, with a memorable melody unfolding over gently shifting harmonies.  

The Suite No.2 was composed between December 1900 and April 1901 – written simultaneously with the Second Piano Concerto – and first performed by Rachmaninov and Alexander Siloti in Moscow on 24 November 1901. Unlike the Suite No.1, this work has no programmatic element. The first movement, headed ‘Introduction’, is marked Alla marcia, the second is a quick Waltz, the third an ardent ‘Romance’ (Andantino), and the fourth a ‘Tarantella’ (Presto) which brings the work to a dazzling close. 

On one memorable occasion in 1942, Rachmaninov and Vladimir Horowitz played the Suite No.2 at a private concert for family and friends, and at another private performance the same legendary duo played the Symphonic Dances. This work was composed in 1940: the two-piano score is dated 10 August 1940, and the more familiar orchestral version was completed two months later. It turned out to be Rachmaninov’s last composition. Originally, he planned to call it Fantastic Dances and to give each movement a title (‘Noon’, ‘Twilight’ and ‘Midnight’) but settled on the more neutral ‘Symphonic Dances’ and gave the movements simple tempo indications: Non allegro, Andante con moto (Tempo di valse) and Lento assai – Allegro vivace. This work is the supreme example of Rachmaninov’s more astringent late style, though there are also nostalgic self-quotations from earlier works: at the end of the first movement, a serene recollection of the main theme from the First Symphony (1895); and in the finale the chant ‘Blessed art thou, Lord’ from the All-Night Vigil (1915). At the end of the manuscript score, Rachmaninov bade farewell to his composing career with the words: ‘I thank Thee, Lord’.  

© Nigel Simeone

One of the greatest pianists of his age, Rachmaninov’s own compositions for solo piano ranged from shorter works including sets of Preludes and Études-tableaux, to much more grandly-conceived pieces, notable among them his two piano sonatas. The Preludes (Op.23 and 32) were composed between 1901 and 1910. Unlike Chopin’s Préludes, Rachmaninov’s two sets were not conceived as a whole, but even though it wasn’t his initial plan, Rachmaninov eventually mirrored Chopin (and Bach before him) by composing one prelude in each of the twenty-four keys.

Nigel Simeone

Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor was composed between January and August 1913, written simultaneously with his choral masterpiece The Bells. It was first published the following year but Rachmaninov was never entirely happy with the results and he made an extensive revision of the sonata in 1931, claiming that the original version was ‘too long’. Always ferociously self-critical, Rachmaninov’s 1931 revision has often been considered to be too drastic and pianists from Horowitz (with Rachmaninov’s blessing) to Steven Osborne in our own day have made performing editions which combine the best of both versions. The first movement, marked Allegro agitato, opens with a dramatic descent into despair, though this is by no means the only mood: one of the contrasting ideas is richly lyrical and the recapitulation is heralded by a glorious pealing of bells. The slow movement is a lilting intermezzo (with a more intense central section), while the Allegro molto finale brings the work to a thrilling and powerful close. The movements are played without a break and they are unified by thematic references which recur throughout the work.  

 Nigel Simeone

Lento lugubre
Risoluto
Tempo primo
Più vivo
Alla marcia funebre

Rachmaninov wrote two piano trios, both called “elegiac”. The second (D minor) trio was composed at the end of 1893 as a memorial to Tchaikovsky, but the present G minor Trio dates from January 1892, and was first performed on 30 January 1892 with Rachmaninov at the piano and his friend Anatoly Brandukov as the cellist – later to be the dedicatee of Rachmaninov’s Cello Sonata and best man at Rachmaninov’s wedding. The G minor Trio was written while Rachmaninov was still a student, and is a single-movement lamentation. The main theme (reminiscent of a melody in Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony) is first presented by the piano over shimmering bare fifths. This idea dominates the movement, appearing in a variety of guises, and the contrasting falling melody that is no more consoling. The final presentation of the main idea is the most stark – a transformation into a funeral march.

Nigel Simeone © 2011

Rachmaninov’s Variations on a Theme by Corelli have a singular place in the composer’s output as the only major work for solo piano that he composed after leaving Russia in 1917. The title is slightly misleading since these are variations on La Folia, an ancient tune that was used by Corelli – as well as by Lully and Vivaldi among others – but certainly wasn’t composed by him. This set of twenty variations (with an Intermezzo between the 13th and 14th variations) was composed in Switzerland and the manuscript is dated 19 June 1931. Rachmaninov himself gave the first performance in Montreal on 12 October 1931. Dedicated to his friend Fritz Kreisler, the variations show Rachmaninov at his most concentrated and ingenious.

© Nigel Simeone

Maurice Ravel completed Gaspard de la nuit on 8 September 1908, and the first performance took place on 9 January 1909, at the Salle Erard in Paris. The pianist was Ricardo Viñes, one of the most energetic advocates of new French and Spanish music, and a long-time friend of Ravel’s. Exact contemporaries, they were both members of Les Apaches, a group of like-minded artistic friends. While they were students, Viñes had introduced Ravel to the poetry of Aloysius Bertrand that was later to inspire Gaspard de la nuit. Gaspard refers to a Persian treasurer guarding the royal jewels at night. 

Betrand’s prose poems had been published in 1842 (a year after his death), and influenced later Symbolist poets, notably Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Ravel’s Gaspard, subtitled ‘three poems’, begins with Ondine, a dream-like depiction of a water sprite. Ravel’s music seems to mirror the strange beauty of the poem:  

Listen! … it is Ondine who brushes drops of water on the resonant panes of your windows, lit by the gloomy rays of the moon; and here in gown of watered silk, the mistress of the chateau gazes from her balcony on the beautiful starry night and sleeping lake. 

Le Gibet is a grim evocation of a corpse hanging from the gallows. A bell – incessant and obsessive – tolls throughout the piece, represented by repeated B flats, the first and last sounds we hear. 

Ravel once said his initial idea for Scarbo had been to ‘make a caricature of Romanticism’, but admitted that ‘perhaps it got the better of me.’ The result is music of dazzling originality. The poem depicts a goblin who darts in and out of the shadows, and Ravel’s piece mirrors this with quiet passages disturbed by sudden outbursts. The critic Vladimir Jankélévitch described Scarbo as ‘a fiendish encyclopedia of all the traps, obstacles and snares that a limitless imagination can devise for a pianist’s fingers.’ 

 (C) Nigel Simeone

At the start of the 20th century the rivalry between harp manufacturers in Paris resulted in two major works being composed for the instrument. Debussy wrote his Danse sacré et danse profane for Pleyel’s new chromatic harp in 1904, and Ravel was commissioned to produce a piece for Erard’s double-action pedal harp the next year – Introduction et Allegro. He wrote it quickly, completing it in June 1905 with a dedication to Albert Blondel, the director of the Erard company. It was one of the few works that Ravel himself recorded, directing an ensemble led by the harpist Gwendolen Mason for the Columbia record company during a visit to London in 1923 who had previously performed the work under Ravel’s direction at the Wigmore Hall in 1913 (when it was still called the Bechstein Hall). 

The dream-like Introduction opens with a slow-motion version of the theme that later dominates the Allegro, but part of the magic of this opening derives from Ravel’s handling of the instruments, producing colours and effects of stunning beauty and richness. The exquisitely crafted Allegro that follows is in sonata form and it is no less imaginative in terms of its exploration of ravishing instrumental effects, culminating in a dazzling coda. 

At the start of the 20th century the rivalry between harp manufacturers in Paris resulted in two major works being composed for the instrument. Debussy wrote his Danse sacré et danse profane for Pleyel’s new chromatic harp in 1904, and Ravel was commissioned to produce a piece for Erard’s double-action pedal harp the next year – Introduction et Allegro. He wrote it quickly, completing it in June 1905 with a dedication to Albert Blondel, the director of the Erard company. It was one of the few works that Ravel himself recorded, directing an ensemble led by the harpist Gwendolen Mason for the Columbia record company during a visit to London in 1923 who had previously performed the work under Ravel’s direction at the Wigmore Hall in 1913 (when it was still called the Bechstein Hall). 

The dream-like Introduction opens with a slow-motion version of the theme that later dominates the Allegro, but part of the magic of this opening derives from Ravel’s handling of the instruments, producing colours and effects of stunning beauty and richness. The exquisitely crafted Allegro that follows is in sonata form and it is no less imaginative in terms of its exploration of ravishing instrumental effects, culminating in a dazzling coda. 

© Nigel Simeone 

Allegro
Très vif
Lent
Vif, avec entrain

In 1920, Ravel was asked to contribute to a musical supplement in memory of Debussy for the Revue musicale (other contributors included Bartók, Satie and Stravinsky). This ‘Tombeau’ for Debussy (with a front cover specially drawn by Dufy) appeared in December 1920 and included a ‘Duo’ for violin and cello that would become the first movement of the Sonata for Violin and Cello. It was another two years before Ravel completed the other movements and the whole work was published in 1922 with a dedication to Debussy’s memory. Ravel himself described the austere, pared-down language of the Sonata as ‘stripped to the bone’ and said that ‘harmonic charm is renounced’. The Sonata is also remarkable for its thematic unity, and some ingenious cyclic transformations. For instance, the violin theme heard at the start returns later in the work as do other ideas. The Scherzo suggests that Ravel was familiar with Kodály’s 1914 Duo for violin and cello: Ravel includes elements of Hungarian music in a movement of formidable drive and energy. The slow movement is stark and serious and after building slowly to an impassioned climax, its ending is remote and strange. The finale is brilliantly written for both instruments, bringing this extraordinary work to an athletic close, the dissonances finally resolving on to a chord of C major.

© Nigel Simeone 2018

Modéré
Mouvement de menuet
Animé

Ravel composed his Sonatine in 1903–5, just after finishing the String Quartet and the song-cycle Shéhérazade. After several fruitless attempts to win the Prix de Rome, Ravel finally decided that he should pursue his own musical path, and the Sonatine was one of the first results – a work of great refinement, on a much smaller scale than the piano cycle Miroirs that he worked on at the same time.

Ravel’s title evokes something of the elegance of the Classical period, though from the very start it is obvious that Ravel is not attempting any kind of pastiche. Even so, the first movement is in a clearly defined sonata form. The opening presents a singing theme in octaves with a shimmering accompaniment in the inner parts. The second theme is gentler, supported by typically luminous harmonies. The Minuet is a graceful dance, and the finale is driven by the almost omnipresent rapid notes heard at the start of the movement. There are moments of repose, but the movement surges to a flamboyant conclusion.

Ravel dedicated the Sonatine to his friends Ida and Cipa Godebski. The premiere was given in Lyon on 10 March 1906 by Mme Paule de Lestaing, and first performed in Paris on 31 March 1906, by Gabriel Grovlez.

© Nigel Simeone

Allegro moderato. très doux
Assez vif. très rythmé
Très lent Vif et agité

The first two movements of Ravel’s Quartet were finished in December 1902 and the next month he submitted the first movement for a prize at the Paris Conservatoire, where he was still a student. The jury was unimpressed and the Director Théodore Dubois was typically acidic, claiming that it “lacked simplicity”. The failure to win a prize meant that Ravel’s studies with Fauré were over but Ravel persisted with the Quartet, and by April 1903 he had finished all four movements. He put it aside for yet another doomed attempt at the Prix de Rome, but it’s likely that he made further revisions later in the year. The pianist and composer Alfredo Casella recalled running into Ravel in the street in January 1904: “I found [Ravel] seated on a bench, attentively reading a manuscript. I asked him what it was. He said: It is a quartet I have just finished. I am rather pleased with it.” The first performance was given at the Schola Cantorum by the Heymann Quartet, on 5 March 1904. It is dedicated “à mon cher maître Gabriel Fauré”.

In a parallel with Debussy’s Quartet, Ravel makes use of cyclic themes – material heard in the first movement returns in various guises throughout. The second movement is notable for Ravel’s brilliant use of cross-rhythms as all four string players become a kind of gigantic guitar. The rhapsodic slow movement includes a dream-like recollection of the cyclic theme. In the finale, Ravel’s use of irregular time signatures generates a momentum that is not only impossible to predict but impossible to resist. Recollections of the cyclic theme are woven into the texture with great subtlety and the kaleidoscopic string writing produces a conclusion that glitters and surges.

Nigel Simeone © 2012

Electric Counterpoint (1987) was commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival for guitarist Pat Metheny. It was composed during the summer of 1987. The duration is about 15 minutes. It is the third in a series of pieces (first Vermont Counterpoint in 1982 for flutist Ransom Wilson followed by New York Counterpoint in 1985 for clarinettist Richard Stolzman) all dealing with a soloist playing against a pre-recorded tape of themselves. In Electric Counterpoint the soloist pre-records as many as 10 guitars and 2 electric bass parts and then plays the final 11th guitar part live against the tape. I would like to thank Pat Metheny for showing me how to improve the piece in terms of making it more idiomatic for the guitar.

Electric Counterpoint is in three movements; fast, slow, fast, played one after the other without pause. The first movement, after an introductory pulsing section where the harmonies of the movement are stated, uses a theme derived from Central African horn music that I became aware of through the ethnomusicologist Simha Arom. That theme is built up in eight voice canon and while the remaining two guitars and bass play pulsing harmonies the soloist plays melodic patterns that result from the contrapuntal interlocking of those eight pre-recorded guitars.

The second movement cuts the tempo in half, changes key and introduces a new theme, which is then slowly built up in nine guitars in canon. Once again two other guitars and bass supply harmony while the soloist brings out melodic patterns that result from the overall contrapuntal web.

The third movement returns to the original tempo and key and introduces a new pattern in triple meter. After building up a four guitar canon two bass guitars enter suddenly to further stress the triple meter. The soloist then introduces a new series of strummed chords that are then built up in three guitar canon. When these are complete the soloist returns to melodic patterns that result from the overall counterpoint when suddenly the basses begin to change both key and meter back and forth between E minor and C minor and between 3/2 and 12/8 so that one hears first 3 groups of 4 eighth notes and then 4 groups of 3 eighth notes. These rhythmic and tonal changes speed up more and more rapidly until at the end the basses slowly fade out and the ambiguities are finally resolved in 12/8 and E minor.

© Steve Reich

Allegro moderato
Scherzo. Molto vivace
Adagio
Allegro ma non troppo

Carl Reinecke was born near Hamburg, in the town of Altona – which was part of Denmark until 1864. As a young man he worked as court pianist for King Christian VIII in Copenhagen, before moving to a series of jobs in Germany. In 1860 he was appointed director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and professor of composition and piano at the Leipzig Conservatoire, and he remained an important musical force in Leipzig for the next 35 years. Despite his activities as a conductor, pianist and teacher, Reinecke was a prolific composer. Many of his works from the 1880s are groups of short piano pieces and songs, but among the more substantial compositions from this time are two important chamber works: the ‘Undine’ Sonata for flute and piano, and the Trio Op.188 for oboe, horn and piano. Its very unusual scoring suggests that Reinecke wrote the Trio for two specific players in the Gewandhaus Orchestra. It was first performed in the Gewandhaus on 22 November 1886 by the oboist Gustav Hinke, horn player Friedrich Gumpert and Reinecke himself as pianist. Gustav Hinke was principal oboe of the orchestra and was the dedicatee of another trio for the same combination by Heinrich von Herzogenberg (written in 1889) as well as of Reinecke’s own Octet (1892). Friedrich Gumpert was first horn in the Gewandhaus Orchestra from 1864 until 1898. The musical language of Reinecke’s Trio suggests a composer who was a contemporary and friend of Johannes Brahms (Reinecke conducted the first complete performance of Brahms’s German Requiem) but it’s also distinctive: Reinecke writes beautifully for his unusual ensemble, and the long melodic horn line – later taken over by the oboe – in the slow movement is particularly memorable, while the major key finale includes some splendidly idiomatic writing (hunting-horn rhythms and lyrical oboe phrases) that make for a stirring conclusion.

Nigel Simeone © 2010