Sergei Rachmaninoff ended his compositional career with his Op. 45, the Symphonic Dances. I've just been to a concert performance of this amazing work, and have been forcefully reminded that it truly baffles many music lovers. I've no doubt that many people came to yesterday's concert expecting something easily relatable to the most popular of Rachmaninoff's works, the second and third piano concertos.
Well, you can forget that idea right away. Symphonic Dances bears some resemblance to the fourth piano concerto (the least-often heard), but far less that ties it to the composer's earlier, lusher, more romantic style of music.
Instead, what we get is the classic Rachmaninoff world heavily infiltrated -- or even invaded -- by the harmonic and especially the rhythmic innovations of Stravinsky found in The Rite of Spring and Petrouchka.
No doubt in my mind, though -- Symphonic Dances ranks as one of Rachmaninoff's finest and most powerful achievements, a work which deserves the widest currency. In a way, I'm surprised that he chose not to call it a "symphony." I suspect many other composers would have done just that, both because of the scale and scope of the music (it lasts about 35 minutes in performance) and because of its weight and degree of thematic integration.
I've been fortunate in one respect. Since I first fell in love with Symphonic Dances, I've managed to hear it performed live three times by the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, for whom this challenging and complex work has become a definite calling card. Even better, one of those performances was preserved in a fine live-to-disc recording, paired with The Rite of Spring, and this CD is a firm favourite in my collection.
The first movement opens with a persistent rhythmic figure which sounds for all the world like the ringing of sleigh bells, although no bells are in use. A series of emphatic staccato chords launches the main theme. If this indeed is a dance, then it's a weighty and ponderous one, with its obsessive descending triad figure rapidly played over and over. Much of the music is written in the low registers, especially for the strings, which increases the sense of heaviness. The central section of the music brings relief in a lyrical melody for alto saxophone, a melody which begins with a rising triad figure. The opening then returns and the dance is repeated fortissimo before dying down into a slow coda of celestial-sounding chords and melody high up in the registers of the instruments. A few last reminiscences of the main theme quietly end the movement.
The second movement is an undoubted dance, but plainly (to me, at least), a dance of death. A series of thematic fragments form an introduction, and out of this gradually emerges a waltz. The waltz theme is made up of numerous wide leaps from high to low notes (or vice versa); the leaps give the music a disjointed and uneasy character. As the movement progresses, the waltz is accompanied or elaborated with a series of wildly skirling counterpoints on various wind instruments. It all seems to me to be the perfect illustration of a haunted ballroom full of spectral ghosts swirling about. At the end, the waltz speeds up, the rhythms fall apart, and the last wisps of music vanish into thin air.
The three-part finale opens with an emphatic full chord, followed by a series of descending minor thirds. At once, the outline of a rapid movement in 9/8 time emerges, with tolling bells. Very soon, we hear the descending outline of the Gregorian plainchant Dies irae, a musical motif of great emotional power in several of Rachmaninoff's works. The dance that now emerges is a frantic whirlwind of a scherzo, with descending lines full of dotted rhythms and much use of the percussion, all driven onwards by the fast tempo. A frantically energetic coda ends with a sudden silence.
The music then relaxes into a middle section with the last, and perhaps greatest, of Rachmaninoff's lush, slow melodies. Then the dance returns, punctuated frequently by the Dies irae motif. But now another theme begins to emerge in snippets. An Easter hymn of the Russian Orthodox Church, it was set for choir by Rachmaninoff in his early masterpiece, the All-Night Vigil (commonly called Vespers in the English-speaking world). The text of the hymn describes the emotions of those who arrived at the tomb of Christ on Easter morning and found it empty, because the Lord had risen.
The Dies irae and the hymn engage in an uproar of battle between darkness and light while the incessant scherzo races onward, until the hymn emerges triumphant. To aggressive snare drum rhythms, we now hear the hymn complete, with the theme nudged by frequent dotted notes. Emphases and phrase breaks fly all over the map, as the demonic rhythmic scheme breaks into fragments at the assault of the Easter hymn. As the Orthodox melody reaches its end, the orchestra again erupts into the frantic chordal coda, and the work ends in an uproar of off-beat chords and heavy percussion, with a massive stroke on the tam-tam having the final word.
I can't help wondering if Rachmaninoff knew that this would be his final complete work. If so, that might explain the incredible intensity of the battle between darkness and light in the last movement, a battle which still ends unresolved as the music explodes apart. Whatever the truth of the matter, I remain completely convinced that Symphonic Dances is one of the greatest, and most unsettling, masterpieces of twentieth century music.
The second movement is an undoubted dance, but plainly (to me, at least), a dance of death. A series of thematic fragments form an introduction, and out of this gradually emerges a waltz. The waltz theme is made up of numerous wide leaps from high to low notes (or vice versa); the leaps give the music a disjointed and uneasy character. As the movement progresses, the waltz is accompanied or elaborated with a series of wildly skirling counterpoints on various wind instruments. It all seems to me to be the perfect illustration of a haunted ballroom full of spectral ghosts swirling about. At the end, the waltz speeds up, the rhythms fall apart, and the last wisps of music vanish into thin air.
The three-part finale opens with an emphatic full chord, followed by a series of descending minor thirds. At once, the outline of a rapid movement in 9/8 time emerges, with tolling bells. Very soon, we hear the descending outline of the Gregorian plainchant Dies irae, a musical motif of great emotional power in several of Rachmaninoff's works. The dance that now emerges is a frantic whirlwind of a scherzo, with descending lines full of dotted rhythms and much use of the percussion, all driven onwards by the fast tempo. A frantically energetic coda ends with a sudden silence.
The music then relaxes into a middle section with the last, and perhaps greatest, of Rachmaninoff's lush, slow melodies. Then the dance returns, punctuated frequently by the Dies irae motif. But now another theme begins to emerge in snippets. An Easter hymn of the Russian Orthodox Church, it was set for choir by Rachmaninoff in his early masterpiece, the All-Night Vigil (commonly called Vespers in the English-speaking world). The text of the hymn describes the emotions of those who arrived at the tomb of Christ on Easter morning and found it empty, because the Lord had risen.
The Dies irae and the hymn engage in an uproar of battle between darkness and light while the incessant scherzo races onward, until the hymn emerges triumphant. To aggressive snare drum rhythms, we now hear the hymn complete, with the theme nudged by frequent dotted notes. Emphases and phrase breaks fly all over the map, as the demonic rhythmic scheme breaks into fragments at the assault of the Easter hymn. As the Orthodox melody reaches its end, the orchestra again erupts into the frantic chordal coda, and the work ends in an uproar of off-beat chords and heavy percussion, with a massive stroke on the tam-tam having the final word.
I can't help wondering if Rachmaninoff knew that this would be his final complete work. If so, that might explain the incredible intensity of the battle between darkness and light in the last movement, a battle which still ends unresolved as the music explodes apart. Whatever the truth of the matter, I remain completely convinced that Symphonic Dances is one of the greatest, and most unsettling, masterpieces of twentieth century music.
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