Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) was a consummate master musician
— composer, pianist and conductor. Self-deprecatingly, he once
maintained that he had "chased three hares," citing the old Russian saying to
imply that he had never really caught any of them. But Rachmaninoff managed to
pursue all three careers with equal success and to equal acclaim.
These days, we have to take his conducting skill largely on trust, drawing
conclusions about its interpretative vision mostly from contemporary reviews,
because as a conductor he made only three recordings
— of his own symphonic poem The Isle of
the Dead, the Third Symphony and his orchestral arrangement of the famous
Vocalise
. As far as his gifts as a pianist go, we are luckier, because
he began making records almost 
immediately after emigrating from Russia in 1917 and
continued producing them right up until the year before his death in 1943.
Rachmaninoff had a remarkable technique. In an age when accuracy of notes was not always regarded as the sine qua non of pianism that it is today, Rachmaninoff's playing was marked by immaculate precision. But, much more than that, he had an exceptional ability to convey not only the structure of a piece but also its essential character, substance and vitality.
The spirit and poetry of his performances were belied by his stage presence. Stravinsky once described Rachmaninoff as a "six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl", and eyewitnesses to his recitals often commented on his somber demeanor. But beneath that reserved exterior lay a fertile imagination and a tremendous warmth and generosity — a fact that becomes self-evident when you listen to his music.
Rachmaninoff began composing while still a student at
the Moscow Conservatoire, where his first piano teacher, Nikolai Zverev,
introduced him to many of the leading musical figures of the day, including the
composer who was to have the most immediate impact on his own works,
Tchaikovsky. There is a pronounced Tchaikovskian feel to such early
Rachmaninoff pieces as the D minor symphonic movement of 1891 
and some of his songs and piano miniatures, as
well as in the opera Aleko, written as his graduation exercise from the
Conservatoire's composition class in 1892. But this soon began to give way to a
more personal style, characterized by a rich seam of lyrical melody often tinged
with dark, minor-key inflections, underpinned by succulent Romantic harmony and
enhanced by distinctive orchestral coloring. These qualities reached their first
maturity in the Second Piano Concerto and the Cello Sonata, both completed in
1901 and marking, as it were, Rachmaninoff's coming-of-age as a composer.
From then until the time he left Russia in 1917, he completed all but six of his major works. Sometimes, of course, he wrote for his own instrument, the piano, as is the case with the two sets of Études-tableaux Op.33 (1911) and Op.39 (1916–17) and the Third Piano Concerto, composed in 1909 with a view to his first American tour starting in the autumn of that year. He gave the premiere of the concerto at the New Theater on 28 November with the New York Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Damrosch, and on 16 January 1910 repeated it at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic under no less a figure than Gustav Mahler. In the Concerto, as in the solo works of this period, the piano writing reflects Rachmaninoff's own phenomenal gifts as a pianist, but he used his insight into the piano's potential not to write music of gratuitous display but rather to draw from the instrument its inherent kaleidoscope of tone and touch, its full range of dynamic and expressive impact, and its capacity for lithe textural activity.
That this ear for idiomatic writing extended beyond the piano is exemplified
by the purely orchestral works that Rachmaninoff wrote at about the same time.
His impressive choral symphony The Bells (1913), based on verses by Edgar
Allan Poe in a Russian translation by the symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont,
reveals Rachmaninoff as a discerning virtuoso in terms of orchestral timbre,
whether in his choice of solo instruments or in the creation of a sumptuous
canvas rich in intricate detail and subtle effects of coloring. The Bells
encapsulates Rachmaninoff's life-long fascination with the 
emotional states
that bells can suggest, a fascination founded in his childhood memories of the
campanological clangour emanating from churches in the Novgorod countryside. A
love and respect for Russian church music and ceremony also led him in due
course to compose one of the great Russian Orthodox liturgical settings, the
All-Night Vigil (1915, often known, erroneously, as the
"Vespers"), in which the sonority of the a cappella vocal writing
achieves an almost orchestral breadth, opulence and variety of expression. In
The Isle of the Dead, the symphonic poem that he wrote in 1909,
Rachmaninoff focused on the fatalistic strand that ran through his personality.
The music was inspired by Arnold Böcklin's celebrated painting (or at least on a
black-and-white reproduction that Rachmaninoff saw at an exhibition), and draws
a crepuscular sound-picture of the shrouded island to which the departed were
ferried by the mythological Charon, intensifying the overcast mood by
incorporating into the musical fabric the Latin chant Dies irae that
recurs many times in Rachmaninoff's music.
The Dies irae crops up again in the Rhapsody on a Theme of
Paganini (1934) as a counterpoint to the diabolical theme itself, taken from
Paganini's violin Caprice Op.1 No. 24. The Rhapsody was one of the
half-dozen works that Rachmaninoff composed after emigrating to the West in the
wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Divested of his property and all but
very little money, he was compelled to devote the last 25 years of his life to a
career as a concert pianist, only occasionally finding the time and 
tranquillity
in which to indulge his real love, composition. Settling in America in 1918, he
soon felt the need to add a major new work to his repertoire, and resurrected
thoughts he had already had in Russia on a Fourth Piano Concerto. The premiere
(in Philadelphia in 1927, conducted by Stokowski) was not a success: critics and
audiences alike still preferred the Second and Third Concertos; Rachmaninoff cut
and revised the score before it was published in 1928, and did so again for the
"definitive" version (1941) that is generally played today. However, the
original, unpublished manuscript score (the one to be heard during "Rachmaninoff
Revisited") is a much more organic structure than either of the two truncated
versions. Particularly in the finale (the movement that suffered most from
Rachmaninoff's blue pencil), the musical ideas flow more naturally and with more
convincing architectural logic.
In the Fourth Concerto, and even more so in the Variations on a Theme of Corelli(1931) for solo piano and the Symphonic Dances(1940) for orchestra, there is a new clarity to Rachmaninoff's instrumental writing, a rhythmic incisiveness and a strange, inward-looking harmonic vocabulary. If we might wonder if this last facet was prompted by his memories of old Russia, it is more openly expressed in the Three Russian Songs (1926), and particularly in the Third Symphony (1935–38), a work tinged with nostalgic longing and imbued with a profound sense of something lost that cannot be regained.
Whether nostalgic or no, Rachmaninoff could by this time look back on an illustrious, multi-faceted career spanning half a century. He had come a long way since his early days as a student. He died, just short of his 70th birthday, at his house in Beverly Hills, which could scarcely have been further removed from the atmosphere of Moscow or the wide expanses of his beloved Russian countryside, but which signalled the scale of his success. Lionized as a pianist and widely respected as a conductor, it was nevertheless as composer that he would have chosen to be remembered. Lincoln Center's "Rachmaninoff
Revisited" does just that, presenting as it does a series of works that reveal him as a composer who, while developing markedly over the years, maintained a distinctive voice, and one whose sincerity of expression shines through every note he wrote.
