Remembering Rachmaninoff: NMPhil concert to celebrate composer's 150th birthday

Sep. 26—The New Mexico Philharmonic will celebrate Sergei Rachmaninoff's 150th birthday with a concert of his First Symphony and his Piano Concerto No. 2 on Saturday, Sept. 30, at Popejoy Hall.

2022 Olga Kern International Piano Competition winner Jonathan Mamora will perform the concerto.

The recent winner of the Scottish International Piano Competition, Mamora is an Indonesian American from Southern California and has performed throughout North America, South America, Europe and Asia.

The great Russian pianist, conductor and composer Rachmaninoff was, in many ways, the last great representative of the Russian Romantic style brought to fruition by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers. This in no way prevented Rachmaninoff from developing a thoroughly personal idiom, whose lyricism is enhanced by a sure grasp of form and brilliance of orchestration.

Rachmaninoff had a disastrous first experience as a symphonist. His Symphony No. 1, composed in 1895, received its first performance in 1897, with Alexander Glazunov conducting, and the event was an unmitigated failure. According to Rachmaninoff's wife, Glazunov was drunk, although it may have been that he simply did not care for the piece. Russian composer César Cui called it "a program symphony on the Ten Plagues of Egypt," a work that relied on "the meaningless repetition of the same short tricks." Other critics more charitably acknowledged that the piece was badly performed. The conductor Aleksandr Khessin recalled that the "symphony was insufficiently rehearsed," resulting in a "bland performance, with no flashes of animation, enthusiasm, or brilliance of orchestral sound." Rachmaninoff subsequently went into a deep depression that lasted for three years, and it seemed for a time that the world would be deprived of any further compositions from his pen. Fortunately, with the help of a physician and through continued work as a performer, Rachmaninoff worked though the trauma, emerging in 1900-1901 with his popular Second Piano Concerto.

The composer's Symphony No. 1 was his second attempt at composing in this genre. While a student at the Moscow Conservatory, his teacher Anton Arensky suggested that he try his hand at composing such a work. Only one movement from this stylistically eclectic "Youth Symphony" has survived, but it is rarely performed. Despite the unfortunate circumstances surrounding its premiere and subsequent reviews, time has been far kinder to Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 1, even as it remains one of his least frequently performed major orchestral compositions, overshadowed as it has been by the popular Symphony No. 2 and Symphonic Dances.