Sergei the Somber

By William Bender

The Moscow psychiatrist leaned forward intently. "You will write your concerto," he intoned. "You will work with great facility ... The concerto will be of excellent quality." On the couch lay Sergei Rachmaninoff, 27, in a hypnotic trance. At the time (1900) Rachmaninoff was noted as a pianist and conductor. But as a composer he was notorious. His First Symphony had been premiered three years earlier to unanimous disapproval, so shattering his confidence that in the time since he had been unable to compose at all. Of his monumental block, Rachmaninoff recalled years later: "I felt like a man who had suffered a stroke and lost the use of his head and hands."

Soiree Idol. The psychiatrist's patience and persuasion worked. A year later Rachmaninoff finished his Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor. It became his most popular work and, after the Tchaikovsky First Concerto, the most popular piano concerto in the repertory. As for Rachmaninoff, he went on to lead one of the few 20th century musical careers that can accurately be called spectacular. Only the Pole Josef Hofmann could be compared with him as a virtuoso pianist, and even Hofmann behaved deferentially around Rachmaninoff. No other concert pianist, except Prokofiev, had Rachmaninoff's stature as a composer. No composer since Liszt ranked as such a keyboard soiree idol.

Almost as important, no pianistcomposer had ever been as thoroughly recorded at so many key points in his life. From 1919, shortly after he fled Russia, until 1942, a year before his death in Beverly Hills, Calif., at 69, Rachmaninoff was a steady visitor to the recording studios. Beethoven, Chopin, Scriabin, Bach, Mozart, Handel, Liszt and, of course, Rachmaninoff--the music of these and other composers he committed to disc. Unfortunately, throughout most of the ensuing years, collectors have been denied a comprehensive accounting of this legacy; as soon as one new Rachmaninoff album was issued, another seemed to be deleted from the catalogue. Rachmaninoff's first discs, eight recital pieces by Chopin, Mozart, Scarlatti, Liszt and himself that were recorded acoustically in 1919 for the Edison Co., have not been available since the mid-1920s.

Now a new five-album, 15-LP release from RCA makes amends handsomely, if belatedly. The set contains, for example, not just the famous recording of the Second Concerto made with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1929 but also another version with the same performers from 1924. Then there is Rachmaninoff partnering Fritz Kreisler in a fancy-free performance of Beethoven's Violin Sonata in G, Op. 30, No. 3 (1928). There is a stupendous performance of Beethoven's 32 Variations in C Minor, which might well have been retitled 26 Variations since Rachmaninoff omitted variations 15-18, 20 and 21 to squeeze the work onto two sides of a single 78 r.p.m. record. There are the myriad piano transcriptions that Rachmaninoff wrote for recital encores, notably the Prelude from Bach's Violin Partita in E and the Scherzo from Men delssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream. There is the finest recording ever made of Schumann's Carnaval, astonishingly warm and realistic in sound quality despite its 1929 vintage. Rachmaninoff the conductor is also represented, leading the Philadelphia in effective readings of his soulful Third Symphony (1939) and brooding Isle of the Dead (1929).

What kind of keyboard interpreter was Rachmaninoff? Like composer, like pianist. He was an unabashed romantic with unsurpassed gifts for pianistic col or, rhythmic thrust and pure trickery. But his most distinguishing trait at the keyboard was probably the pesky individual life of each of his fingers. When he wrote for himself, as in his four Piano Concertos and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Volume 5 in the new release), he filled his pages with thickets of notes. So clustered are they that one suspects that he begrudged even a moment's pause or silence, at least when there was a finger unoccupied.

Appealing Melodies. Rachmaninoff's composing style, like his playing, was undeniably showy at times. Further, the substance unquestionably fell short of great music. Rachmaninoff s muse simply did not have the requisite universality; try as he might, and he did try, he could not transcend for long the monochromatic lugubriousness of his emotional palette. Yet his sound is so distinctive, his melodies are so appealing, his orchestrations so skillful, that Rachmaninoff's music simply will not go away, despite the condescension of academia and the critics. He may not have written music "of his own time" (assuming serialism and atonality to be the proper fashion), but then neither does Benjamin Britten nor Dmitri Shostakovich. Nor, in other eras, did Edward Elgar or Bach worry about being in vogue.

Thus, despite Rachmaninoff s short comings, the new RCA set is welcome, valuable and indeed historic. In a sense, RCA is lucky to be able to issue the collection. The company, which started out as the Victor Talking Machine Co. in 1901 and was absorbed by RCA in 1929, has an estimated 200,000 metal molds of rare early recordings sitting in a warehouse in Queens, N.Y. Unattended, it would seem. When it came time last year to assemble the Rachmaninoff anthology, many of the molds were found to be corroded, misfiled or lost. Of the material in the new issue, fully 80% was dubbed from original records lent to RCA by private collectors. What a triumph for buffdom. What an embarrassment for a mature record company.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.