Symphony Preview The Comeback Kid

For Valentine’s Day weekend, Music Director Stéphane Denève and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra have a program that features a pair of passionate audience favorites by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, along with the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s multi-media Concerto for Orchestra, “PALETTE.”

I covered Clyne’s work extensively in an interview with her on my video blog. In this piece I’m going to concentrate of the two Romantic blockbusters by liberally re-writing material I first published about a decade ago.

[Preview the music with the SLSO's Spotify playlist.]

Tchaikovsky circa 1872

There’s little doubt that the "Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy" is one of the Greatest Hits of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893). First performed in Moscow in 1870 and then revised in 1877 and 1880, the work manages the neat trick of compressing the essential emotional themes of Shakespeare's five-act tragedy into around 20 minutes of music. The "love theme" is, as Daniel Durchholz writes in his program notes for a 2014 St. Louis Symphony performance, "one of Tchaikovsky's best and most memorable melodies." With lyrics by Buddy Bernier and Bob Emmerich, it even became a hit song: "Our Love," recorded by the Larry Clinton band in 1939.

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 by Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943), which concludes the concerts, inspired not one but two pop songs (three if you count a 1975 Eric Carmen ballad), both recorded by Frank Sinatra: “I Think of You” from 1957 (adapted from the second theme of the first movement by Jack Elliott, Don Marcotte) and “Full Moon and Empty Arms.” The latter was adapted by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman. Sinatra’s recording rose to number 17 on the Billboard charts in 1945.

Of somewhat more interest than the concerto’s success as a source of Top 40 inspiration, however, is the remarkable story of its troubled origins.

Rachmaninoff’s career got off to promising start. By the age of 20 he had already finished his Piano Concerto No. 1, had his opera Aleko produced to great acclaim at the Bolshoi Theater, and published a plethora of works for orchestra and solo piano. That includes his immensely popular Prelude in C-sharp minor, which the composer would later come to loathe. In short, Rachmaninoff’s star was on the rise

That star fell abruptly when the composer's Symphony No. 1 had its St. Petersburg premiere in 1897. The performance was a debacle. Conductor Alexander Glazunov, a notorious alcoholic, was said to be conducting under the influence and critics hated it. Vituperatively.

Rachmaninoff in 1900
en.wikipedia.org

The psychological impact on the young Rachmaninoff's was devastating. He spiraled down into a depression so severe that friends urged him to seek help from one Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who was then making a name for himself in Moscow with hypnotherapy.

Dahl hypnotized Rachmaninoff daily for three months. "I heard repeated, day after day,” recalled the composer, ”the same hypnotic formula as I lay half somnolent in an armchair in Dr. Dahl's consulting room. 'You will start to compose a concerto—You will work with the greatest of ease—The composition will be of excellent quality.' Always it was the same, without interruption."

The result was everything Rachmaninoff could have hoped for. Ideas for the concerto "began to well up within me," he reported. The second the third movements were completed by the autumn on 1900 and by the spring on 1901 the entire work was ready for a November Moscow premiere under Alexander Siloti, with the composer at the piano. It was a hit and has remained so ever since. Rachmaninoff was on the comeback trail.

The SLSO recorded all of Rachmaninoff’s concertos in 1990 under Leonard Slatkin with Abbey Simon at the keyboard. You can listen to the 2023 remaster of the Concerto No. 2 on Spotify. I think it holds up quite well. The soloist this weekend will be Nikolai Lugansky, who gave us a superlative Rachmaninoff Concerto No. 3 back in 2017 with John Storgårds at the podium. Lugansky recorded all of the concertos in the early 2000s, so this will likely be familiar territory for him.

The Essentials: Stéphane Denève conducts the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra in the world premiere of Anny Clyne’s “PALETTE,” Tchaikovsky’s "Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy," and Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 with piano soloist Nikolai Lugansky. Performances are Friday and Saturday, February 14 and 15, at 7:30 pm at the Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri—St. Louis campus. Saturday night’s concert will be broadcast live on St. Louis Public Radio and Classic 107.3 and will be available as an on-demand stream for a month starting the week of February 17th.