Rachmaninoff wrote his Second Piano Concerto in 1900-01, shortly after what seemed to be the greatest trauma in his life up to that point.  Three years earlier, he had composed a symphony that met with a disastrous reception at the St. Petersburg premiere.  The fiasco was caused largely by the poor performance and the prejudices prevalent in St. Petersburg towards young composers from Moscow, and was therefore in no way Rachmaninoff’s fault.  Yet the composer fell prey to such severe depression that he became unable to write any music.  In his despair, he turned to a psychiatrist by the name of Dr. Dahl, who used hypnosis to restore Rachmaninoff’s faith in his own creative powers.  When the composer was finally cured, he expressed his gratitude by dedicating his new concerto to Dr. Dahl.

As so often with Rachmaninoff, the principal vehicle to convey his ‟personal communication” is his own highly individual melodic writing.  He makes the piano ‟sing” with the passion of an operatic hero, though at the same time he also has it perform the most dazzling musical acrobatics with fiendish arpeggios and other types of virtuoso passagework.  The piano is the protagonist throughout, but the orchestra is equally important and there are many prominent orchestral solos.  There are times when the pianistic fireworks merely serve as an accompaniment to the melody presented in the orchestra.

Each of the Second Concerto’s three movements contains numerous tempo changes in accordance with the evolution of the musical characters.  But the unity of the work is ensured by the thematic recapitulations prescribed by Classical rules.  Rachmaninoff counterbalanced his effusive, hyper-Romantic melodic writing by an almost academic adherence to traditional musical craft with regard to matters of form.  He scored the second-movement ‟Adagio sostenuto” in E major, a tonality far removed from C minor, the concerto’s home key; but he bridged the gap between those two keys by modulating passages that open both the second and third movements.  Both Beethoven in his Third Piano Concerto and Brahms in his First Symphony had used this C minor/E major relationship between their respective first and second movements.  In both cases, one may hear the jump between the two unrelated tonalities.  Not so in Rachmaninoff.  His ‟bridges” between movements exemplify something he strove to do throughout the concerto, namely to eliminate all ‟rough edges” and create a flow of great melodies unimpeded by breaks or jolts in the continuous unfolding of the musical events.

Notes By Peter Laki