An Affair with Rachmaninoff

Last Saturday was exceptional. It was exceptional not because I went to the HKPO's concert at the Culutral Centre, which I did quite regularly. It was exceptional because of two persons, one from Holland and the other from Macedonia: Edo de Waart just returned but this time with Simon Trpceski as part of an all Rachmaninoff affair.

Trpceski is a Macedonian pianist (b 1979) , a graduate of the U of St. Cyril and St. Methodius in Skopje in 2002 and is now teaching there and performed with such famous conductors as Zinman, Maazel, Jurowski, Ashkenazy, Alsop, Duhamel and Petrenko. There is an excerpt below when he played the second movement of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra when he played the both the No. 2 and 3 under Vasily Petrenko, and was an instant top of the chart hit for the public .

The evening's programme was an all Rachmaninoff (1873-1943) affair. It starts with his Scherzo in D Minor written in February 1888, when Rachmaninoff, was 14  and just starting to take formal composition with Sergei Taneyev and Anton Arensky.The Scherzo, a very lively piece, is said to be influenced by that of Mendelssohn but already has got some of his characteristic combination of joy with sadness. It was originally intended as part of a failed symphony. It was not discovered until two years after he died and was first premiered in Moscow on 2nd November 1945.

 

The next piece was the highlight of the evening, Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor Op 18. This is one of Rachmaninoff's most popular piano concertos and has been played by numerous others. What I find most remarkable in Trpcepski's play is the control of the notes and its flowing quality. I enjoy particularly the way he plays the low notes in the slow passages and the way he phrases the music. Even at the climaxes, where other more flambuoyant perfomers would go all out and hit the piano keys like a wild beast, he remains balanced and controlled. His very sensitive pianistic dialogues with winds in the second movement is simply heavenly.  As a result, his is one of the most enjoyable performances of the piece that I have heard. If the whole concert consisted of nothing but this single piece by him, I would have been completely satisfied. As expected, he drew thunderous applauses from the nearly fully packed concert hall audience and he obliged with three encores, one with the HKPO and two alone. I like really like that jazz like piece based upon a Rumanian folk song.

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The evening's program continued after the intermission with Rachmaninoff''s Vocalise which is another frequently heard piece by the composer. Originally composed as part of the songs he wrote based on texts by such writers as Pushkin, Tolstoy and Chekhov and others based on Goethe, Shelley and Heine, the piece was intended to emphasize the flowing melodic line of the song by the singer. He later adapted it for the orchestra.

The last piece was Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances Op 45. These were written by him whilst he settled down in Long Island in 1939 after he stopped his strenuous concert tours of  nearly 2 decades and was premiered by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in Janaury 1941. He died two years later. It was a mature work. Originally he named the dances, Midday, Twilight and Midnight but later decided to drop such programmatic titles. However, the qualities of those times of the day were vaguely evident as we hear the music.  It was a piece in which each part of the orchestra had its moment of glory. Although many crticis regard him as just ordinary as a composer and has introduced little innovation in terms of compositional style, he following mainly the romantic style of Tchaikovsky's way of composition, he has produced some of the most beautiful melodies known to the classical music lover. For me, Rachmaninoff shall always have a special place in my heart because I first heard him whilst I was still in my teens and I still remember how rapt I was with his music even then. On Saturday night, I was able to hear his first and his last compostion. I am grateful.