In August, 1940 Rachmaninoff wrote to conductor Eugene Ormandy: “Last week I finished a new symphonic piece, which I naturally want to give first to you and your orchestra. It is called
Fantastic Dances.”

Rachmaninoff had second thoughts about the title. “It should have been called just Dances,” he said, “but I was afraid people would think I had written dance music for jazz orchestras.” At one point he even considered titles for the three movements–“Midday,” “Twilight” and “Midnight”--but abandoned the idea in favor of the Italian tempo designations.

By the time Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra introduced the work on January 4, 1941, Rachmaninoff had settled on the title Symphonic Dances.

A New York performance three days later received a lukewarm reception. The World-Telegram reported that “the composer took a bow from the stage. The prolonged applause was doubtless a tribute to himself rather than to his music, for the novelty nowhere rises to his best standards…. The piece teems with weird sounds, some of them just plain echoes. Mr. Rachmaninoff’s orchestra is definitely haunted, especially the wind section, which is a real rendezvous of ghosts.”

Olin Downes, writing in the New York Times, was more perceptive: “The dances are simple in outline, symphonic in texture and proportion. The first one, vigorously rhythmed and somewhat in a pastoral vein, is festive in the first part and more lyrical and tranquil in the middle section. The second Dance begins with a muted summons, or evocation, of the brass, a motto repeated in certain places, and for the rest there are sensuous melodies, sometimes bitter-sweet, sometimes to a Viennese lilt--and Vienna is gone.

In the last Dance, the shortest, the most energetic and fantastical of the three, an idea obtrudes which has obsessed the musical thinking of Rachmaninoff these many years--the apparition, in the rhythmical maze, of the terrible old plain chant, the Dies Irae.”

~ Program notes by Charley Samson, copyright 2023