Program Notes
Garrick Ohlsson, pianist
January 22, 2000, The Southern Theatre
About Mr. Ohlsson
Born in Bronxville, New York in 1948, Garrick Ohlsson came to international prominence in 1970 when he won the gold medal at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Poland, although by then he had already won first prizes at the 1966 Busoni Competition in Italy and the 1968 Montreal Piano Competition. Among his many keyboard teachers are numbered Claudio Arrau, Olga Barabini, Sascha Gorodnitzki, Rosina Lhevinne, and Irma Volpe. In Spring 1994, Ohlsson was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize, and in Spring 1998, he was named Ford Honoree Artist by the University Musical Society of the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.Garrick Ohlsson appears through arrangement with Arts Management Group, Inc., 150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 830, New York, New York 10011.
For more information about Mr. Ohlsson's discography and performance schedule, click here.
Sergei
Rachmaninoff (1873-1943)
Had
his early domestic life been more peaceful or secure, Sergei Rachmaninoff might
never have become one of late Russian romanticism’s most renowned pianists,
composers, and conductors. Family
financial misfortunes and the separation of his parents contributed to young
Sergei’s poor performance in both musical and general studies at the
conservatory in St. Petersburg. After
failing most of his exams in 1885, he was sent to the Moscow Conservatory to
live and study with Nikolai Zvereff, who had a reputation as both teacher and
disciplinarian.
In
four years at Zvereff’s, Rachmaninoff honed his skills as a pianist and
encountered many of the most important composers of the time, among them Anton
Arensky, Anton Rubinstein, Sergei Taneev, and especially Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.
Also during this time, Rachmaninoff wrote some of his earliest
compositions. He and Zvereff had a
serious falling-out in 1889 when the youngster asked for more privacy and his
own piano in order to concentrate on composing.
Not only were the requests refused, but following a heated argument the
nascent composer was thrown out of the residence all together.
Rachmaninoff’s mother urged the boy to take this opportunity to return
to St. Petersburg, but by this time he so idolized Tchaikovsky that returning to
the place where Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov reigned was unappealing by comparison.
Rachmaninoff
remained in Moscow, living with friends and relatives, graduating from the
Conservatory early with honors in piano in 1891, and then winning the Great Gold
Medal in composition the next year. This
so impressed the publisher Gutheil that Rachmaninoff was signed to a publishing
contract straight out of school. Later
in 1892, he wrote his “Morceaux de fantaisie, op. 3,” his first published
solo piano works. The second of
those five pieces shot the composer’s name clear around the world.
The “Prelude in C-sharp minor,
op. 3, no. 2” became an international sensation for the composer, but the
bane of the pianist Rachmaninoff’s existence, as it remained his most popular
work and surefire encore for decades. In
a way, it also encapsulates Rachmaninoff’s style, brooding and dark with a
turbulent center and an elaborate conclusion. He first performed the “Prelude” in Moscow on September
28, 1892, and dedicated the whole Opus 3 set to his harmony teacher at the
Conservatory, Arensky.
Rachmaninoff’s
medal-winning one-act opera, “Aleko” premiered at the Bolshoi in spring
1893, catching the attention of Tchaikovsky himself.
In fact, Tchaikovsky was planning to conduct Rachmaninoff’s symphonic
poem “Utyos” (“The Rock,” op. 7) during the upcoming season, to help
advance the career of the young composer who, it turns out, would extend
Tchaikovsky’s own legacy well into the new century.
Sadly, Tchaikovsky died in November 1893 and was unable to carry out any
such plans.
Through
much of 1895, Rachmaninoff worked on his first truly major work, the “Symphony
no. 1.” It received its premiere
on March 27, 1897 under the baton of Alexander Glazunov, and was a disaster.
According to certain reports, Glazunov was drunk for the performance.
Whatever the reason for the fiasco, it sent Rachmaninoff into a
three-year crisis of self-doubt during which he wrote next to nothing.
Luckily, he was hired to conduct for the 1897/1898 season of the Moscow
Private Russian Opera, where he became acquainted both with the standard
operatic repertoire and with the bass Fyodor Chaliapin.
Still, it was not until after Rachmaninoff sought medical help for his
depression that he resumed composing in the summer of 1900.
Among
the works that marked Rachmaninoff’s return to writing in 1900-1901 was the
“Piano Concerto no. 2,” which would become one of his most popular.
The growing maturity of the concerto is also reflected in other works of
the same period, particularly the “Preludes, op. 23.”
The very first of the set to be composed was the 1901 “Prelude
in G minor, op. 23, no. 5.” After
Rachmaninoff’s death, Fritz Kriesler transcribed the piece for violin and
piano. The “Alla marcia” motif
of the first measure gives rise to the opening and concluding sections.
In between, the Second Concerto makes its proximity felt with a lush
melody accompanied by wide arpeggios in the left hand.
During
the first decade of the twentieth century, Rachmaninoff’s reputation as both
composer and pianist grew. In 1909,
he was persuaded to visit the United States on a concert tour, for which he
wrote his monumental “Piano Concerto no. 3.”
He hated touring, however, and declined offers to stay on as conductor of
the Boston Symphony Orchestra or to follow up this overseas tour with others.
Instead, he devoted himself again to composing.
In
the summer of 1911, he wrote a set of nine “Etudes-tableaux, op. 33,” which
he performed on a British tour that fall. Before
the set was published in 1914, though, he withdrew three of the etudes.
One was later published as part of his like-named Opus 39 set; the
remaining two appeared posthumously. Rachmaninoff
never revealed the visual inspirations for any of the “Etudes-tableaux,”
although they are thought to have been quite specific.
“Op. 33, no. 3, in C minor”
was among those withdrawn and not published until 1948.
The closing passages of the etude, pretty much as he wrote it in August
1911, turned up in the “Largo” of the “Piano Concerto no 4, written in
1926 and revised in 1941. The
original “Op. 33, no. 6, in E-flat minor” stayed with the set and was
published as “no. 3.”
Rachmaninoff
exhausted himself performing around Europe during the 1912/1913 season and
resolved to spend the summer of 1913 in Rome composing.
One result was the “Sonata no. 2
in B-flat minor, op. 36,” dedicated to his childhood friend Matvey Presman. For years thereafter, Rachmaninoff complained that the work
was too busy and too long. Finally
in the summer of 1931, he sat down and took a serious red pencil to it, thinning
the texture and excising measure upon measure of empty virtuosity.
Not every pianist or critic was pleased by the composer’s pruning job.
Ever since, some pianists perform the original version, some the revised
version, and some (most famously, Vladimir Horowitz) concoct their own pastiche
versions.
If
there is a resemblance between the 1931 revision of the “Sonata no.2” and
the so-called “Variations on a Theme of
Corelli, op. 42,” it’s no coincidence.
Rachmaninoff worked on the revised sonata and the new set of variations
around the same time, completing the latter on June 19, 1931, and dedicating it
to Fritz Kreisler. The attribution of the theme to Arcangelo Corelli (1653-1713)
was inaccurate. In fact, the tune
is the ancient Portuguese melody “La Folia,” which had been borrowed by
countless composers including Corelli (for his “Sonata op. 5, no. 12”), J.S.
Bach, Alessandro Scarlatti, and Liszt. Rachmaninoff
premiered the work in Montreal on October 12th.
Later that same year after several subsequent performances, he wrote to a
friend, “I have not played them in full once.
I was guided by the coughing of the public.”
Whenever there was too much coughing, he’d skip the next variation,
playing as few as ten and as many as eighteen on the tour, but never all of them
at once. When they ARE all played,
there are twenty variations on the “Andante” theme in D minor.
An “Intermezzo” introduces the fourteenth variation, in lush D-flat
major, and the work concludes with a calm, thoughtful coda.
Although
Rachmaninoff lived until 1943, the “Corelli Variations” would be the last
original solo piano piece he would write. He
composed only three works, all orchestral (“Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,
op. 43;” “Symphony no. 3, op. 44;” and “Symphonic Dances, op. 45”)
during his final decade. He did, however, revise a number of works and (especially
from 1922 onward) arrange a selected group of pieces by others and a few of his
own, mostly for piano solo.
Rachmaninoff
originally transcribed the three-movement “Suite
from the Violin Partita in E Major, BWV 1006,” by Johann Sebastian Bach in
1933, but in 1941 revised his versions of the “Gavotte” and “Gigue.”
The arrangement of the “Scherzo from ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” by Felix
Mendelssohn also dates from 1933. “Liebesleid”
(Love’s sorrow) and “Liebesfreud”
(Love’s joy) are two of three works originally for violin and piano in Fritz
Kreisler’s collection of “Alt-Wiener Tanzweisen” (Old Viennese dance
tunes). Rachmaninoff arranged them
for piano in 1931 (some sources claim ten years earlier) and 1925, respectively.
Rachmaninoff almost literally killed himself touring, even though he had already decided that the 1942/1943 season would be his last as a public performer. On tour in the United States, he was clearly unwell through the early weeks of 1943, although he insisted he must carry on. After his last concert on February 17th in Knoxville, Tennessee, he had to return home to Beverly Hills, where he died on March 28th.
For
additional background information on Rachmaninoff, please click here.
Program notes by Jay Weitz, Consulting Database Specialist for music, OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Dublin, Ohio. He is a contributing performing arts critic to the InnerArt Web site at http://innerart.com/performancespace/index.html and to the eDANZ Web site at http://www.edanz.com..
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