Rachmaninov Piano Concertos, overrated?

[sbeckmesser]

Well, IMSLP doesn't need ANYBODY telling anybody else that they don't "love music." How insulting! Especially from a stranger. I will be the first to admit that Rachmaninoff is a great composer, but even he would probably say he sits on the second rung, like Ravel or Scriabin, both of whom I like more than Rachmaninoff. I even listed my favorite orchestral works of the latter, to which I also would add "The Bells."

But in Rachmaninoff's piano concerti, I do not find "simple chord progressions" -- that's the inevitable result of Russian post-Tristan harmony. Nor do I think his chord progressions as "beautiful" in their "arrangement." As I said, if one only read my post carefully, I find the piano writing in the concerti "unremittingly dense and opaque" to which I now might also add a further perjorative adjective: turgid. The orchestration in the concerti is similarly not "well constructed" but also dense and congealed. Rachmaninoff did not seem to care that in his concerti he plunked down an overly dense piano texture on top of the already dense orchestral texture of, for example, his Second Symphony. His 3rd Symphony shows a significant change in orchestral writing and I wish the clearer textures there and in the Symphonic Dances had been available to him for the writing of the 2nd and 3rd Concerti. Likewise a violin concerto from Rachmaninoff would have been fascinating since he would not have had the sheer density of sound of a grand piano to play with and all that right-hand piano figuration might be very suitable, with some minor adjustments, to a violin.

One can create beautiful romantic and post-romantic chord progressions in a concerto without an overload of figuration or a gelatinous orchestral texture -- for example, the concerti of Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky. Bartok, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Berg (Chamber Concerto) and, another second-rung composer I like more than Rachmininoff, Saint-Saens who, given his obvious penchant for clarity of line and texture, not to mention comparatively conservative harmonic language, probably would have found the same faults in Rachmaninoff as I've been enumerating, and probably even more.

While I have many faults, not loving music isn't among them. And at least I am able to generate considered and knowledgable verbal responses to music, positive and negative, without propping myself up with a glib quotation. Two could all too easily play at this game. Be careful, or I'll start trotting out the most vituperative of Wagner's prose writings -- auf Deutsch.

--Sixtus

[KGill]

I agree with you. However, because I'm annoying, I'd like to add a couple things:
Rakhmaninov did actually write two violin concerti. I've never heard them and to be honest don't really want to.
I think I also disagree with you in the first- and second- rung composers...the concerti of Chopin, Liszt, and Chaikovsky are all quite poorly structured. They're all too long and too fragmentary, and the piano (or other instrument) vs. orchestra handling is kind of cringeworthily bad. They're not IMO good examples of what any of those three could do (or anyone else, for that matter). But I agree with you overall- especially 'turgid'.

[Melodia]

....the one right above mine.

[Niels]

What.
Did Rachmaninoff write Violin Concerto's? Do you have any sources for that?
I got a collection of Rachmaninoff's works without any Violin Concerto.
http://imslp.org/wiki/List_of_compositi ... chmaninoff
imslp also says he didn't write any violin concerto's.

He did write two pieces for violin and piano.

[vinteuil]

I've heard something - a while ago - the person said that they didn't deserve to be placed among his other works.
Liszt and Chopin are aweful examples of concerti. If you want a really good example of the concerto form, look no further than the Beethoven First.

[KGill]

@Niels: My bad, it's Richard Strauss I was thinking of (and only one concerto and a sonata), he's someone else you wouldn't really expect to write something like that for the violin (because he didn't know how ). However, I have definitely heard somewhere that he had two...which is kind of strange...

[SeanMartin]

Just to offer a slightly different perspective on the discussion...

When I lived in Calgary, I had this friend who loved to hit the antique auctions. Sometimes I'd go, and there would be these flat-out hideous pieces of furniture put up for sale at absurdly high prices. One night I commented to Michael that I couldnt understand how people could pay such good money for such ugly crap. He simply shrugged his shoulders and said, "There's a reason they live long enough to be considered antiques, Sean. The chairs are too uncomfortable to sit on. The lamps were hidden away in the library. The silverware was brought out only for "special" occasions and then returned to the drawer. In essence, these things stayed around because they were, for all intents and purposes, unusuable. Pretty to look at, I suppose, but that's about all -- and for these people, that's enough." When I audibly demurred at that, he just said, "Eye of the beholder."

I'd posit that some popular music, whether classical or any other form for that matter, hangs around not because it's especially well wrtten but because it's comfortably familiar. Everyone knows SCHEHEREZADE, but it's hardly the best thing R-K wrote. It's just the one we hear the most. Orff may be known for CARMINA BURANA, but his more obscure stuff (like DAS MOND) is, IMHO, far more interesting. But it gets set by the wayside because it's not the stuff everyone wants to hear: we all want to hear that big bombastic choral work of "O Fortuna". It's the most familiar, the most immediate in our knowledge of who Orff is as a composer.

I'm not a huge fan of Rachmaninov, TTTT. He does pound it on rather relentlessly, to the point where it seems like the overly architectural structure gets in the way of the music. But people love to hear it. It sells like crazy. It's that precious antique of music that we think is highly valued because we've been told so so many times. But is it really?

[steltz]

I've read a lot of these opinions, and now I will throw my two cents in. It's similar in an odd way to Sean Martin's opinion.

I spent nearly 20 years in a symphony orchestra (well, all but three of them were purely symphony, the rest was combined symphony/pit work). Musicians working in the field frequently have different opinions about music than people who go to concerts, for the simple reason that audiences only hear a work once, and we have to rehearse it 4 or 5 times, and then play however many concerts are on the schedule.

Repetitiveness annoys "us" much more than "them", same with schmaltziness. I haven't listened to a Tchaikovsky symphony on CD since the last one I played live, nor do I intend to. His Violin Concerto has traditional frequent 4-bar cuts in it to cut down on excessive repeated phrases. Tchaik's Manfred is the subject of another thread here, and I haven't contributed my opinion there, but I feel it's in the same category, though possibly I've just played it too many times. (I can definitely live with Tchaik's 6th, and I do think it's his best, far outshining Manfred.)

Much of Rachmaninov will fall into this category, although I will make a HUGE exception for the Symphonic Dances, which I love to death, and would play a million times without complaint. Although I have enjoyed playing the clarinet solos in both the 2nd Symphony and 2nd Concerto, there are huge expanses of both of those works which tire.

Bruckner, well . . . burp . . . . I don't think we need any more separate threads for discussing individual composers, let's just leave Bruckner here. He's definitely in this category.

I guess my point is that there is a lot that is impressive on one hearing, or if you only hear it once a year or once every two years. Most regular concert goers will hear a Bruckner symphony every second year (if that -- I think we only did one every 3-4 years), a couple of the Tchaikovsky symphonies get done once a year, etc. etc., but still, they won't get that tiring on that basis -- at least if you're in the audience.

[allegroamabile]

Repetitiveness annoys "us"

If repetitiveness turns you off from a piece, try listening to Glazunov's Symphonies (with an EXCEPTION of the Fifth) and Walter Piston's music. The last movement of the Third is a great example "unrepetitiveness," different melody after different melody and all of them are very pleasant to hear. I do not know one piece by Piston that is repetitive. Oh and by the way, did you know Piston wrote a clarinet concerto?

[Lyle Neff]

Repetitiveness annoys "us"

If repetitiveness turns you off from a piece, try listening to Glazunov's Symphonies (with an EXCEPTION of the Fifth) and Walter Piston's music. The last movement of the Third is a great example "unrepetitiveness," different melody after different melody and all of them are very pleasant to hear. I do not know one piece by Piston that is repetitive. Oh and by the way, did you know Piston wrote a clarinet concerto?

Well, then -- if Piston wrote more than one composition, doesn't that make him repetitive?

[allegroamabile]

very clever...

[Yagan Kiely]

Closed see this thread.