Program Notes: Nobuyuki Tsujii Plays Rachmaninov

SERGEY RACHMANINOV  
Piano Concerto No. 3 in D Minor, Opus 30 
BORN: Semyonovo, Russia, April 1, 1873 
DIED: Los Angeles, March 28, 1943 
WORK COMPOSED: 1909 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 28, 1909, in New York City, with the composer as piano soloist and Walter Damrosch conducting the New York Symphony.  

What to Listen For: 

• The element of virtuosity, for which this concerto is famous, is not present from the start. Instead, Rachmaninov uses the piano in a restrained manner to state the first theme of the opening movement. But with this done, the solo instrument adds glittering figuration to the orchestra’s restatement of the theme, establishing transcendent keyboard technique as a key aspect of the piece.
  

• The concerto’s initial theme returns in varied form during the second movement. Other material from the opening movement recurs in the finale. 

Sergey Rachmaninov composed his Third Piano Concerto in 1909 and played the solo part in its initial performance, given in New York in November of that year. One of the earliest reviews of the concerto noted that its “extreme difficulties bar it from performance by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers.” The work has indeed become famous as an Everest for pianists, so much so that it served as an emblem for daunting pianistic challenge in Shine, the 1996 film about the Australian pianist David Helfgott.  

Rachmaninov composed this work at a time when his career and his production as a composer were enjoying a period of ascendency. Some years earlier, the critical failure of his First Symphony had plunged the Russian musician into a state of depression and creative torpor. For three years he idled away much of his time at the rural estates of family and friends. (One imagines his life at this time as something out of a play by Chekhov.) Eventually, however, he regained confidence in his abilities and began writing again, producing a stream of music that cemented his reputation as a composer.  

With his renewed success came new opportunities. Early in 1909, Rachmaninov received an offer to undertake an extensive concert tour of the United States. Initially, he hesitated to accept, not wishing to be absent from his family for a period of months. But the financial terms of the offer were too generous to pass up. Rachmaninov was particularly tempted by the possibility of purchasing an automobile during his stay in America.  

In accepting the American invitation, Rachmaninov agreed to compose a new piano concerto that he would perform with several orchestras. All through the spring of 1909, various obligations prevented him from working on this piece and it was not until June that he set to writing it. The composition went smoothly, however, and the piece was finished before the end of summer.  

But Rachmaninov had not had time to learn the demanding solo part he had composed for himself before his departure for the U.S. He therefore brought a practice keyboard along on the voyage and on this device worked to master the concerto’s intricacies. This unusual practicum proved sufficient. Rachmaninov played the concerto with consistent success throughout his American tour. A notable performance occurred on January 16, 1910, at Carnegie Hall in New York, when the orchestra was led by Gustav Mahler. 

Apart from its obvious virtuosity, the concerto’s musical character derives chiefly from two traits that inform Rachmaninov’s output as a whole: an unabashedly lush and effusive Romanticism; and a certain Russian melancholy. The composer establishes the latter quality at the beginning of the work with a theme given out by the piano as a spare melodic line over minimal orchestral accompaniment. The minor-mode contours of this subject suggest an old Russian song. One musicologist even proposed that it derives from a Russian Orthodox Church chant, though Rachmaninov insisted that it “is borrowed neither from folk song nor from liturgical sources. It simply wrote itself.” Later we hear a second subject, a warmly romantic idea announced by the piano alone, and a third theme that has something of the character of a march. The development of these materials leads to a thunderous climax and a long, extremely demanding cadenza solo. An abbreviated reprise of the initial subject then brings the movement to a quiet conclusion. 

The second movement, which Rachmaninov describes as an “intermezzo,” entails two highly contrasted types of music. Its initial section considers a quiet theme introduced by the strings but worked up by the piano into an almost vehemently impassioned expression. Suddenly, however, the tempo quickens, the texture becomes gossamer, and the music assumes the manner of an animated scherzo. Here the orchestral woodwinds give out a variant of the main theme of the first movement. The finale, which follows without pause, is the concerto’s most spirited movement, and it provides a thrilling display of keyboard virtuosity.  
 
Paul Schiavo © 2017, revised 2025 


JOHANNES BRAHMS  
Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98 
BORN: May 7, 1833, in Hamburg, Germany 
DIED: April 3, 1897, in Vienna, Austria 
WORK COMPOSED: 1884–1885
WORLD PREMIERE: October 25, 1885, in Meiningen, Germany, with Hans von Bülow conducting the Meiningen Orchestra. 

What to Listen For:  

• Johannes Brahms’ Fourth Symphony is a deeply thoughtful but also deeply moving work that proceeds from an engaging opening through a richly beautiful slow movement and boisterous scherzo to a finale of bracing rigor and power. 

Johannes Brahms’ Fourth Symphony is a deeply thoughtful but also deeply moving work that proceeds from an engaging opening through a richly beautiful slow movement and boisterous scherzo to a finale of bracing rigor and power. 

Johannes Brahms’ four symphonies have been cornerstones of the orchestral repertory for well over a century, and with good reason. More than any composer, Brahms succeeded in combining the qualities of taut subliminal drama and imposing sonic architecture that Beethoven had made the hallmarks of his symphonic music. The Fourth Symphony, a singular masterpiece, melds poetic invention with the most thoughtful treatment of musical ideas and formal design.   

Brahms wrote this work during the summers of 1884 and 1885, which he spent at the small town of Mürzzuschlag, in the Austrian countryside. This would be the composer’s final essay as a symphonist and his penultimate work for orchestra. Although a dozen years remained to Brahms, only the Double Concerto, Op. 102, followed this symphony in the line of his orchestral compositions. 

The Fourth also proved the most difficult of Brahms’ symphonies for his contemporaries to apprehend. The inner circle of the composer’s Viennese friends, who heard a preview performance on two pianos in September of 1885, generally found it troubling. Eduard Hanslick, an influential music critic, found it like “two very clever people arguing,” and Max Kalbeck, who would become Brahms’ biographer, went to the composer the following day to plead for a revision of the work. Even Theodore Billroth, an intelligent physician whose musical perceptiveness Brahms greatly respected, found it at first “too massive, too tremendous, too full,” though he discovered that with closer acquaintance the music became “more and more magnificent.” 

While Brahms undoubtedly felt disappointed at the failure of his closest friends to embrace the new symphony, he probably expected as much. He was well aware that the character of the work was more rigorous than genial, its effect bracing rather than beguiling. Nevertheless, he refused to alter the score apart from minor details of instrumentation, which he revised following an initial orchestral reading in October, 1885. Brahms may have been surprised, but surely was gratified, that the symphony was received enthusiastically on this and subsequent occasions.

The Fourth is the only one of Brahms’ symphonies to launch directly into the principal theme of its first movement without so much as a note of introduction. This abrupt beginning disturbed a number of early listeners, including the great violinist Joseph Joachim, another of the composer’s musician friends, who urged Brahms to add a few measures of preparation. The movement’s two main subjects are well defined and strongly contrasted, and Brahms develops both ideas with his customary skill.  

Many commentators have remarked on the modal contour of the melody that forms the basis of the second movement, and Brahms uses its tonal ambiguity to fashion uncommonly beautiful harmonies and melodic variations. By contrast, the ensuing scherzo is perhaps the most boisterous music the composer ever produced.

But Brahms saved his trump card for the finale. It’s constructed as a passacaglia, a set of ongoing variations over a repeating eight-note theme presented at the outset by the winds. Passacaglia form is an old one and was favored by composers of the Baroque period. It is also daunting in its strictness. Yet its severity is largely the source of its strength. Brahms responds to the constraints of the passacaglia procedure with music of tremendous power and expressiveness, the rigid framework of eight-measure phrases serving as a foil for his creativity. The whole movement is carefully shaped, subsiding from an imperious opening sequence to a tranquil central group of variations before building inexorably to a final climax. In its inspired discourse and formal perfection, Brahms’ last utterance as a symphonist must be counted among his greatest achievements. 

Paul Schiavo © 2016, revised 2025