Program Notes: Xian Conducts Rachmaninov

MELISSA DOUGLAS 
Awaken 
BORN: 1992, Southeast Australia 
COMPOSED: 2023 
WORLD PREMIERE: September 7, 2023, by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Xian Zhang. 

Melissa Douglas is a rising talent from Australia who was the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s 2023 Cybec Young Composer in Residence, the first female-identifying composer in the residency’s 20-year history. She produced three commissions for MSO; Awaken was the third and final one in the series, written with the “Abundant Spring” theme in mind and originally premiered by our own Music Director in a program featuring Schumann’s First Symphony and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. 

According to her artist statement, “… this piece was inspired by abundance and growth, which builds and propels to the ending. Throughout several cycles, Awaken stirs from the stasis of winter to expand and regenerate. These cycles swell and gradually unfold with an exploration of color and an increase in momentum. Dormant seeds of ideas transform into fields of flowers and golden landscapes of canola, with bursts of growth and activity along the way. These dream-like cycles reflect a soundscape of spring.” 

Seattle Symphony © 2025

SERGEY RACHMANINOV 
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43 
BORN: April 1, 1873, in Semyonovo, Russia 
DIED: March 28, 1943, in Beverly Hills, California 
WORK COMPOSED: 1934 
WORLD PREMIERE: November 7, 1934, in Baltimore, by The Philadelphia Orchestra, with Rachmaninov on piano and Leopold Stokowski conducting. 

Born and trained in Russia but a longtime resident of the United States, Sergey Rachmaninov achieved fame as both a pianist and a composer. In the former endeavor, he became one of the great keyboard virtuosos of the 20th century, with a technique comparable to that of Franz Liszt. As a composer, Rachmaninov produced symphonies, tone poems, two operas, songs and choral works. Not surprisingly, he also wrote a great deal of music for the piano, both alone and as a solo instrument with orchestra. Among the latter category of works is his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. 

Rachmaninov composed this piece during a month of concentrated work in the summer of 1934, and he appeared as piano soloist with the Philadelphia Orchestra in the premiere performance the following November. This and subsequent presentations in both America and Europe met with exceptional success, and the work has remained one of Rachmaninov’s most popular. 

The title “Rhapsody,” which implies a kind of spontaneous and loosely structured composition, is a misnomer that fails to credit the carefully planned architecture of this music. Formally, the piece presents a set of variations on a melody from the Capriccio in A Minor, for solo violin, by the celebrated 19th-century violin virtuoso Nicolò Paganini; calling his work a rhapsody allowed Rachmaninov the flexibility to explore diverse musical ideas and moods, inspired by Paganini’s theme, without being bound by rigid form. (This theme has attracted several other composers, most famously Liszt, who transcribed it for piano as one of his Grand Etudes After Paganini, and Brahms, who used it as the subject of his own Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 35.) At the same time, the work’s scoring for solo piano and orchestra gives the impression of a concerto, an impression reinforced by the overall shape of the piece. It begins and ends with a series of fast variations framing a central group in slower tempo, an arrangement that mirrors the conventional three-movement, fast-slow-fast concerto format. 

The combination of variation and concerto forms is not the only feature of interest in this work. Rachmaninov refrains from presenting the Paganini melody at the outset, where we would normally expect it, beginning instead with a brief introduction followed by the first of 24 variations. This gives little more than a skeletal outline of the theme’s harmonic structure. Only with this finished does the melody of Paganini’s Caprice appear in the violins. Rachmaninov then begins to elaborate his appropriated material in imaginative ways, reshaping the Paganini melody, adding counterpoint, varying harmonic shadings and rhythmic contours, and occasionally stretching it at certain points. 

With the seventh variation, the composer introduces a new thematic element. While cellos and bassoons play a paraphrase of the Paganini melody, the piano presents an ancient plainsong melody. It is Dies Irae, the ancient ecclesiastical chant for the dead, simply but eloquently harmonized. That theme, which Rachmaninov quoted in several other compositions and thereby made something of a musical signature, reappears in the 10th variation. The variation that follows is essentially an accompanied cadenza — a rhapsodic solo for the pianist — and marks the beginning of the (mostly) more leisurely “middle movement.”  

Here the individual variations increasingly take on the aspect of character pieces, each with a distinct mood, instrumental colors, and sonic textures. This section concludes with a wonderfully lyric eighteenth variation, which features the type of memorable, song-like melody that Rachmaninov wrote so well. (First stated by the piano, it is taken up by orchestral violin section against a throbbing keyboard accompaniment.) Thereafter, the music grows increasingly brilliant and energetic, closing with a dramatic recurrence of the Dies Irae melody played against a variant of the Paganini theme during the final variation. 

Paul Schiavo © 2017, revised © 2025 

SERGEY RACHMANINOV  
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 
WORK COMPOSED: 1907 
WORLD PREMIERE: February 8, 1908, in Moscow, conducted by the composer.

The music of Rachmaninov represents the final flowering of the Russian Romantic tradition. Nowhere is Rachmaninov’s Romanticism more evident than in his Second Symphony, whose expressive melodies and lush textures are a major source of its appeal. But this symphony is also notable for its thoughtful construction, evident in the close relationships among its themes.  

The creation of this symphony marked a turning point in Rachmaninov’s career as a composer. That career had started hopefully. Rachmaninov was a child prodigy who had developed his talent rapidly. By the time he was 20, he had completed a piano concerto; an opera, Aleko, which was triumphantly produced at the Bolshoi Theater; several tone poems and chamber pieces; and a number of keyboard works, including the famous Prelude in C-sharp minor. The stage seemed set for a lifetime of rich creative accomplishment. 

But Rachmaninov’s artistic progress came to an abrupt standstill in 1897 with the disastrous premiere of his Symphony No. 1. The scathing reception of that work, on which Rachmaninov had pinned much hope, plunged the composer into a prolonged state of depression and inactivity. During the next three years he composed nothing, and only after undertaking a course of therapeutic hypnosis, in 1900, did he regain the confidence to begin writing music again. Still, he pointedly avoided symphonic composition and continued to subordinate his creative work to his career as a performer. 

By 1906, however, the life of a part-time composer was no longer satisfactory. Rachmaninov’s confidence and ambition had recovered considerably, and he now wished to establish himself as a major creative artist. Resigning from his conducting post at the Bolshoi Opera, Rachmaninov moved to Germany and, in Dresden, rented a secluded house where he could devote his energies fully to composition.   

The first work Rachmaninov completed in his Dresden retreat was his Second Symphony. A piano draft of the music was finished in early 1907 and orchestrated during the summer. The new work was received enthusiastically at its first performances in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, in February 1908, and its success encouraged Rachmaninov to proceed with one of his most famous works, the tone poem The Isle of the Dead, completed later that year. 

Although its very immediate emotional appeal constitutes its most obvious and winning quality, we can also admire the Second Symphony for its thoughtful construction, evidenced in the close relationships among its themes. We find this particularly in the first movement, whose introductory Largo is based entirely on a brief “motto” figure — that is, a thematic idea recurring conspicuously at different points over the course of the composition — which is presented in the opening measures by the cellos and basses. Rachmaninov builds this section with care, restraint and a skilled use of counterpoint, making it one of the most satisfying passages in his symphonic output. The main body of the first movement, which follows in a quicker tempo, also issues from the motto theme. Its principal melody, heard in the violins over a plaintive clarinet accompaniment, begins with an almost literal rephrasing of the motto, and the graceful second theme develops the motto’s tail of descending eighth-notes. 

In the ensuing scherzo, Rachmaninov replaces the melancholy tone of the first movement with a distinctively Russian vigor. Here a brash opening gives way to a more lyrical second subject and a lively, rhythmic central episode. Rachmaninov plays his strong suit in the ensuing Adagio, spinning out the kind of voluptuous, romantic melodies at which he excelled.    

The finale presents a succession of contrasting themes: a playful opening subject, a march-like figure and a warmly expressive melody for the violins. As the movement progresses towards its conclusion, the composer recalls ideas heard earlier in the symphony, most notably the motto theme and the principal subject of the Adagio. 

Paul Schiavo © 2014, revised 2025