Rediscovering Rachmaninoff: Day 3

No time for full post so some quick notes. Friday, April 3, attended hours and hours of Rachmaninoff at the PSO.

7pm, Listening to Rachmaninoff with festival curator Horowitz and conductor Gianandrea Noseda: A brief (half-hour), but interesting exchange. Horowitz played some records and discussed the uniqueness of Rach recordings by Stokowski's legendary Philadelphia Orchestra. Italian maestro Noseda tried to explain why he is championing Rach's unloved 1st symph by performing it 8 times around the world this year.

8pm, Pittsburgh Symphony concert, Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini, "Spring Cantata" and Symphony No. 1. Noseda, conductor, Simon Trpceski, piano, Vassily Ladyuk, baritone, Mendelssohn Choir. Okay. The festival is called "Rediscovering Rachmaninoff," but at the risk of sounding glib, I found both the Spring Cantata and 1st Symphony rightly forgotten. Noseda pulled out an A+ effort as he valiantly tried to convey the enthusiasm for the piece he described in the pre-concert talk, but the symphony struck me as a snooze. I'm hardly alone in this opinion; it's been disliked since its premier, and Horowitz's program liner notes tiptoe around the elephant in the room: 99% of people don't like it, or ever liked it. But let's try *really hard* and maybe we will. I am sure that pros like maestro Noseda can enjoy, say, the motivic connections between the symphony's first and third movements, but I dunno.

The Spring Cantata. I wonder if the Mendelssohn Choir was annoyed at assembling at Heinz Hall for just this 15-minute piece. The problem with Spring Cantata is that, despite the 100-odd people on stage (full orchestra, full chorus, baritone solo), it seemed so small, such a minor work. Take any other work for chorus and orchestra-- Carmina Burana, Ein Deutsches Reqiuem, Beethoven's Ninth, for God's sake-- they're BIG! Was this uninspired Russian folk poem about a cheating peasant wife truly the best use of a small army of professional musicians? This would be better suited to a chamber ensemble, a soloist + small orchestra or quartet or something.

10pm, Post-concert performance by Vakhtang Kodanashvili, piano. Although brief, this was the most satisfying for me because it, like the Paganini Variations, is the Rachmaninoff we already know: big, impressive, virtuosic piano banging. I understand that the entire point of the festival is to challenge this very notion, and the crudeness of my comments here is meant to be provocative. I know there's much to love and admire in any Rach work, but so far I doubt that, for a general listener like myself, the Rach repertoire will ever expand beyond the Rach we already love. The Symphony 1 and Spring Cantata surely haven't changed my mind.

2/5 Duchamps