Piano Concerto 3 - Rachmaninov (1873-1943)

The life of a musician is hard enough without such a turbulent start as Rachmaninov suffered. The several homes that the family owned were reduced to one due to his father’s profligacy. Eventually, even that was not sustainable forcing a move from Oneg, in the Novgorod area, to St. Petersburg. The nine year old Serge Rachmaninov was sent to the Conservatoire for both a general education and a thorough grounding in piano and musical theory. Ever present domestic troubles were compounded by the death of his sister Sofiya and the separation of his parents. The fact that he failed all his general studies in 1885 meant that the Conservatoire considered withdrawing his scholarship. Thus, aged just twelve years, he was packed off to the Moscow Conservatory for a harsher regime of study under the disciplinarian, Nikolai Zverev. Living at his teacher's flat, practice started at six in the morning! However, at Zverev's Sunday soirées, he did meet many of the famous and influential, including Anton Rubenstein, Arensky and the composer who was to influence him most strongly in his early years, Tchaikovsky. In 1888 Rachmaninov moved on to study the piano with his cousin Ziloti in the senior department of the Conservatoire. Now, helped by his release from the authoritarian atmosphere at Zverev's house, he could take his first steps in composition under the guidance of Arensky. In 1890 he paid a first visit to a country estate at Ivanovka where he fell in love with the youngest of three daughters but, more importantly, found a setting so congenial that he returned throughout his life to compose the majority of his music. In 1891 he was allowed to take his final piano examinations a year early graduating with honours. A year later a one-act opera gained him the highest possible marks and the Moscow Conservatoire's rarely awarded Great Gold Medal.

Thus two parts of his musical armoury were poised for the world at large. He added the third later by becoming a distinguished conductor. Armed with this considerable array of talents a brilliant career was assured. He made his first trip to America in 1909 including the new Third Piano Concerto in his repertoire. Although his first impressions of the New World were distasteful, events in Europe leading to the second World War, saw him return in 1939. He was a musician of the utmost sensitivity yet still enough of a modern man to enjoy owning the first car in his area of rural Russia, speeding across Lake Lucerne in a splendid speedboat and eating ice-cream sodas in the States. He died of cancer at his house in Beverly Hills on the 28th March 1943 and was buried at the Kensico Cemetery, Valhalla just outside New York. The three movements of his Third Piano Concerto are so treasured that description is hardly necessary. Here is music that speaks straight to the heart set out on a palette of the richest orchestral sonorities. Sometimes melancholy, sometimes almost overwhelmingly rapturous, the listener can hardly fail to be moved by this sublime music.

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