Скачать или смотреть Rachmaninoff - Symphonic Dances Mvt 1 | Anja Bihlmaier | New World Symphony (2025)

For most of his career Rachmaninoff, also one of the great pianists of his time, was the object of critics’ scorn for remaining stylistically rooted in the 19th century while living in the 20th. However, with the Symphonic Dances, Rachmaninoff combined a modernist rhythmic element—inspired by Stravinsky and Prokofiev—with his own unquenchable penchant for the big tune.

The Symphonic Dances had its beginnings as far back as 1915, in sketches for a ballet score called The Scythians (not to be confused with Prokofiev’s Scythian Suite) that he submitted to dancer-choreographer Mikhail Fokine, who rejected them as “unballetic.” A quarter-century later, while living on New York’s Long Island, Rachmaninoff resurrected ideas from The Scythians to form the first movement of the Symphonic Dances, which premiered in 1941 by its dedicatees, Eugene Ormandy and his Philadelphia Orchestra. The initial reception for what is now widely regarded as Rachmaninoff’s most important symphonic work was lukewarm. The audience wanted more lushness, the critics less. It has since become the darling of critics among the composer’s scores and, increasingly, an audience favorite.

Rachmaninoff, his performers’ capabilities ever in mind, was in the habit of having an accomplished violinist check the practicability of the bowings for all his works involving strings. For the Symphonic Dances, this function was fulfilled by no less than Fritz Kreisler, Rachmaninoff’s frequent recital partner. Since Kreisler considered no violin part too difficult, the score emerged as music for a virtuoso orchestra.

The terse, march-like opening thematic figure dominates the entire first movement. It features prominently even in the gorgeously mournful, quintessentially Russian episode for the alto saxophone, whose part was tested by another expert, the composer and Broadway arranger Robert Russell Bennett. The final theme of the movement, announced staccato in the strings, is an exotic, richly chromatic affair that Rachmaninoff seems to have lifted from his de facto orchestration textbook, Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera The Golden Cockerel. In the coda, Rachmaninoff quotes the opening theme of his First Symphony.

-Herbert Glass

Originally performed January 18, 2025.

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