Carnegie Hall: Valery Gergiev Conducts Rachmaninoff

There are no better performances of the Russian repertoire than those of the Mariinsky Orchestra when conducted by Valery Gergiev.  Last evening's all Rachmaninoff program at Carnegie Hall was no exception.  It was a remarkable reading of two of the greatest pieces written by the last of the Russian romantic composers.

The first piece was the Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 (1909).  Rachmaninoff himself considered this the best of his four piano concertos.  The music has an unmistakably Russian character, and the dense orchestration provided the Mariinsky players an opportunity to display their talents to the fullest.  I was startled to find in the program notes that Rachmaninoff explicitly linked the structure of his work to The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe.  (The composer would later use Poe's poem The Bells as the basis for a choral symphony of the same name.)  Rachmaninoff wrote:

"Each piece is built up around a climax: The whole stream of tones must be so calculated, and the content and form of each so clearly graduated, that the climax seems to be completely natural... It must come as a liberation from the last material obstacle..."

Rachmaninoff had composed this concerto on the occasion of his first American tour in order to demonstrate to his audiences his abilities as a virtuoso pianist.  Accordingly, the work presents challenges to even the most skilled musician.  The soloist yesterday, Denis Matsuev, was fully up to the task and handled even the most difficult passages brilliantly. Afterwards, he performed two long encores to close the first half - Rachmaninoff's Etude-Tableau in A minor and an improvisation by the pianist.

The second half consisted of only one piece, the Symphonic Dances, Op. 45 (1940).  I posted last week about having heard in recital the composer's two-piano arrangement of this same work.  Hearing once again the full orchestral version came as something of a revelation.  I had never appreciated before how totally lush is Rachmaninoff's orchestration.  It fairly swirls about the listener very much like a dance in motion.  And there are such great touches throughout, such as the plaintive saxophone in the first movement and the ringing bells in the last.  This work has always been one of my favorite pieces by Rachmaninoff and I've gone to hear it in concert on any number of occasions.  Of all these, the performance by Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra was undoubtedly the best.  It was absolutely thrilling to hear.