Rach Two: Victim Becomes Victor

Rachmaninoff’s awe-inspiring Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, Op. 27 is one of Western music’s innocent bystanders, a casualty of 20th century priggishness that is finally coming into its long-overdue own, a century after its birth. What happened was this:

Rachmaninoff introduced his hour-long masterwork in 1908, after a gestation period of a good two years. He was walking on eggs after the unmitigated disaster of his first symphony back in 1897, unsure of his worth as a symphonist, acutely conscious of the weight of the late-blooming Russian symphonic tradition that he had shouldered. In 1908 Tchaikovsky had been in his grave a mere fifteen years, Borodin for twenty-one years, and Rimsky-Korsakov was still living (although not for long.) Glazunov—whose boozy baton had contributed to the failure of Rach One’s premiere—was still very much on hand, with nearly another thirty years to go. And there stood Rachmaninoff, heir to the Russian romanticists, presenting a gargantuan new symphony in the most grandiose Tchaikovskian tradition. Another failure just might have killed him off as a composer for good, to the detriment of piano students, audiences, and record companies everywhere.

But it wasn’t a failure. Rachmaninoff even received his second Glinka Prize for E Minor symphony. Audiences loved it. So Rachmaninoff felt himself vindicated as a composer, and we got a lot of dandy music.

Looking through a discography of the Rach Two, one finds a clear unanimity of opinion regarding the work’s hour-long length. Back in the days of 78s and LPs, a full hour was not a good thing for a symphony to be: too long to fit on two sides of a single disc, but too short for a 2-LP set, the Rach Two presented record producers with a choice: 1) couple it with something shorter to fill out the remaining 4th LP side, or 2) cut it.

Option #2 was the inevitable choice, spurred on I think by a general opinion that Rach Two was just too long anyway. Rachmaninoff did tend to be a luxuriantly prolix composer, but the sprawling length of the symphony has nothing to do with a lack of skill and everything to do with the general taste of the nineteen-oughts. Size and length were all in those days: Mahler’s huge symphonies, those early Stravinsky ballet scores with their massive orchestras. Ever since Wagner had challenged the public gluteus maximus with the Ring Cycle—egged on by Beethoven with the 70-minute Ninth Symphony—bigger had been generally considered synonymous with better.

But 1908 wasn’t the best time in the world to be introducing another symphonic work in the my-piece-is-longer-than-your-piece sweepstakes. In fact, it was just about the worst time ever. Before long, the First World War would carpet-bomb European culture and bring an end to the old era of bustiers and high-button shoes, sprawling houses with abundant staffs, lavishly funded arts organizations, and a culture that embraced hour-long symphonies and five-hour operas requiring the resources of a small industrial country to produce. Austerity became the watchword, multim in parvo the catchphrase, and brevity the motto. With that came a drying out of emotional resources, spearheaded by the neoclassicism of Stravinsky’s Octet followed by a general dessication extending from Rome to Rio. Prissy holier-than-thou attitudes regarding opulence became de rigeur, and a high-calorie, butterfat-dripping banquet like Rach Two came to be regarded as a high-water mark in the history of bad taste.

So combine the overall trends in 20th century music towards parched cerebralism with the limited playing time of recording media, and you have a recipe for taking a pair of carpet shears to the cushy plush of Rach Two. And they damn near stripped it down to linoleum. That’s a tragedy, because to cut the Rach Two is to castrate it. The work’s high-flown rhetoric and soaring flights of passion don’t work well in a short running time; instead they come off like a two-ton-Tessie diva doing her operatic thing at full blast in a modest community playhouse. What works in the cavernous and elevated embrace of the Met comes off as ridiculous grandstanding in the Elko, Nevada BPOE hall. Even worse, the Rach Two possesses the biggest, heaviest, and most dumbfounding pair of low-hanging cojones in the literature. To take even a moustache trimmer to them—much less a scalpel—is tantamount to a crime against humanity.

That didn’t stop the prissies, though. Cut it they did, snip snip snip snip slice. Nobody piped up much about this injustice, given the general prevailing opinion amongst the intelligentsia that the Rach Two dwelled in the gutter of taste somewhere down there with stripper music.

But times change and attitudes realign, and in today’s world prissiness has gone on the lam and a wholehearted embrace of over-the-top lushness has become increasingly the norm. (Consider the enormous success of Michael Daugherty’s pop-glam symphonic works with their rock-’em-sock-’em orchestrations; even I, a blissfully unbuttoned musical hedonist, wince a bit sometimes during moments of Philadelphia Stories or Metropolis.) With the prissies tucked away back in boarding schools and Sunday schools and ladies’s finishing schools, the rest of us can have a grand old time digging Rach Two’s big, fat, hairy cojones.

Codpiece removed, Big Boy Studmuffin Symphony swaggers back into town, making mad passionate love hither and yon, giving everybody a high old time while tugging at the heartstrings and maybe even twiddling the gonads a bit. And no snipping, slicing, shaving, or plucking allowed. We have finally realized that where the Rach Two is concerned, the only possible motto is Oh, take it Baby, take it. Tell me how much you want it. Let me hear it ALL, Baby.

Consider recordings as a testament to changing attitudes. From 1928, when Nikolai Sokoloff and the Cleveland Orchestra gave the world the premiere recording of the Rach Two, to 1960’s Wallenstein/LA Phil outing on EMI/Capitol, the Rach Two was unmercifully clipped, sometimes to the point of lasting just a tad over a half-hour. (The aforesaid Wallenstein.) But in the late 1960s the inevitable “bigger, longer, and uncut” recording hit the market, and from then on, everybody started doing the whole Rach Two and nothing but the whole Rach Two, with several conductors (Ashkenazy, Kitayenko, Rozhdestvensky, and Temirkanov) going so far even to include the first-movement repeat.

Of late we’re getting a new shower of recordings, it seems each one subtly trumping the last in fervor and passion. I have no intention of providing anybody with a complete rundown of all the recordings in my collection (eleven). But a few remarks are very much in order about certain truly outstanding renditions.

Mariss Jansons conducts the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, 1994 (EMI): if there is to be one and only one Rach Two in your life, let it be this one. The St. Petersburg guys treat this piece as their personal property, and that’s as it should be: their forbears played the premiere back in 1908 under the composer’s baton. Everything that’s fascinating about Russian orchestral playing is on display here, from the pungently expressive winds to the soaring, even occasionally hard-edged, strings. And Jansons paces the thing masterfully. Even better, you can get it on an EMI bargain package that includes all three symphonies plus other goodies.

Ivan Fischer conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra, 2004 (Channel Classics): Ivan Fischer’s BPO leaps nimbly from strength to strength, an assemblage of superb musicians led by one of the finest conductors in the biz today. This Rach Two is mind-boggling, and in places almost shocking in its hedonistic joy. But never does it slop over into saccharine slurpiness; there’s too much discipline in the orchestra, and clear direction from the man on the podium, for that. I need to look up the name of the clarinetist who plays that heart-stopping solo at the beginning of the Adagio; for my money he takes the prize for the most magical rendition ever, right up there with Carey Bell last season at the San Francisco Symphony—and that takes some doing.

Andre Previn conducts the London Symphony Orchestra, 1973 (EMI) and Valery Gergiev conducts the same band, 2010 (LSO Live). Two separate recordings of Rach Two from the almighty LSO, shepherded by two seriously fine conductors. The sound on Previn’s isn’t as crisp as the Gergiev, which offers a you-are-there gut-wrenching realism courtesy of those fine engineers at LSO Live (provided you crank up the volume a bit more than usual). But the Previn is still awfully nice sonically, and the performance as a whole offers a deep-breathed opulence that complements Gergiev’s heated Slavic surge. You can’t go wrong with either, and the LSO either in 1973 or 2010 is an orchestra of titans, giving their titanic all in the interest of a piece they obviously dig like crazy.

Eugene Ormandy conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra, 1959 (Columbia) and 1973 (RCA). Rachmaninoff had a long-standing love affair with the Philadelphia Orchestra, and Ormandy was one of the conductors with whom he worked closely. So any Ormandy/Philly recording of Rachmaninoff automatically carries great interpretative weight. The biggest difference between the two is that 1973 is complete while 1959 is slightly abridged. But you hear a more relaxed, expansive Ormandy in 1973, aided I think by the effortlessly soaring maturity of the Philly in the early 1970s. Ormandy’s Adagio movement is rather businesslike on the whole, unlike Fischer’s give-em-hell-Harry billows or Jansons’s I-will-sustain-this-orgasm-forever wavefronts. So on the whole the Ormandy recordings come off as a bit corporate, a bit boxy, at least when compared to today’s sexier and—aw, heck, why not say it—ballsy-er renditions.

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