Moderato
Adagio sostenuto
Allegro scherzando
The year of the Piano Concerto No.2 was 1900, and its first performance took place on October 14, 1901 with the Moscow Philharmonic. The composer played the piano part in this premier performance. Few of Rachmaninoff’s works are so richly filled with intoxicating melodic ideas; few seem to have arisen in such a soaring flight of inspiration. From the majestic opening of the first movement with its succession of chords pronounced by the solo piano in increasing sonority from pianissimo to fortissimo, through the eloquent melody for oboes and violas in the third movement (one of the most stirring lyric pages in modern concerto literature), the concerto teems with exciting, moving, passionate, tender ideas, pouring forth inexhaustibly. The second movement, Adagio sostenuto, is a particularly poetic page, somewhat sentimental, somewhat nostalgic, but always deeply felt and sensitively expressed.
Rachmaninoff dedicated the concerto to Dr.Dahl whose treatment of Rachmaninoff’s state of despair and morbidity following the failure of his First Symphony and First Piano Concerto enable the composer to compose again with new vitality and freshness. The result was his Piano Concerto No.2, in many respects the best loved of all his larger works, and one of the most inspired. When his vein of melody was tapped, it gushed in a warm stream of that Russian lyricism which can turn the stone heart to water. Rachmaninoff never sought to expound doctrines other than the doctrine of beauty, and that is why his music is always “singing”. He was a composer with soul in his music – emotional, hypersensitive, moody, at alternate moments brooding.
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