February 19, 2023 | Svetlanov Hall of the MIPAC
"Complete Concertos and Symphonies by Rachmaninoff" subsctiption series
Soloist – Nikolai Lugansky, piano
Conductor – Vladimir Spivakov
Rachmaninoff. Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra in F-sharp minor, Op. 1 (2nd edition)
Rachmaninoff. Symphony No. 1 in D minor, Op. 13

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Vladimir Spivakov and the National Philharmonic Orchestra of Russia continue their four-concert series, dedicated to the 150^th anniversary of Sergei Rachmaninoff's birthday, which encompasses all his Concertos and Symphonies. The series started on October 16, 2022, with the Fourth Piano Concerto, the “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and the “Symphonic Dances”. The Maestro and his collective often return to creations of Rachmaninoff who is Spivakov's most loved composer and lodestar.

The second night of the series will feature Rachmaninoff's earlier works. The First Piano Concerto, written in the vein of Russian and European Romanticism (Tchaikovsky, Schumann. Grieg and others), was conceived when the composer was still a Conservatory student. It was premiered in 1892 with the author as soloist under the button of Vasily Safonov. It was the first work which Rachmaninoff presented to the audience and marked as “Opus 1”. In 1917 he re-worked his adolescent composition to make it more artful and mature both for piano and orchestra parts. A great majority of pianists, including the People's Artist Nikolai Lugansky, choose to perform this masterful revision.

The premiere of the First Symphony on March, 1897, in St Petersburg was a flop and a deep mental trauma for the author who felt unable to compose anything for the following three years, the score was not published and thought to be lost. “I shall never show it to anyone and will forbid to do it in my will...” wrote he to Boris Asafiev. The offender was considered to be the conductor Alexander Glazunov who had failed to convey the author's idea to the audience. After Rachmaninoff's death, half a century after the terrible premiere, musicologist Alexander Ossovsky found the orchestral parts of the Symphony in a private archive and managed to restore the whole score. On October 17, 1945, the second birth of the First Symphony took place in Moscow under the baton of Alexander Gauk. That time the “important and original work which had anticipated many facets of the further development of the composer” (Yury Keldysh) was appreciated in full.