Rachmaninov: Piano Transcriptions And Arrangements

Idil Bir

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Cat No: 8550978

Release Date: 12 January 1999

Label: Naxos - Nxc / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099597821

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: RACHMANINOV

Description
Sergey Rachmaninov (1973 - 1943) Piano Transcriptions The Russian composer and pianist Sergey Rachmaninov was born in 1873, the son of aristocratic parents. His father's improvidence, however, led to a change in the fortunes of the family when increasing debts necessitated the sale of one estate after another, followed by removal to an apartment in St Petersburg. It was there that Rachmaninov, at the age of nine, entered the Conservatory on a scholarship. The subsequent separation of his parents and his own failure in general subject examinations brought about his move to the Moscow Conservatory, where he was under the strict supervision of Nikolay Zverev, in whose house he lodged. In Moscow, as time went on, he won considerable success, both as a performer and as a composer, although it was at first on the second of these rules that he seemed likely to concentrate. The Revolution of 1917 brought many changes. While some musicians remained in Russia, others chose temporary or permanent exile abroad. Rachmaninov took the latter course and thereafter found himself obliged to rely on his remarkable gifts as a pianist for the support of himself and his family, at the same time continuing his work as a conductor. Composition inevitably had to take second place and it was principally as a pianist, one of the greatest of his time, that he became known to audiences. Rachmaninov's works for solo piano had been written principally in the years before the Revolution, with only the later addition of his Variations on a Theme of Corelli, in fact the well known La Follia theme, in 1931, when he revised the second of his two piano sonatas. Transcriptions, however, were another matter, and formed an attractive and popular element in his recitals. His arrangements for piano of three movements from Johann Sebastian Bach's Partita in E major for unaccompanied violin were made in 1933. The transcription of the Prelude, into which interesting new elements are introduced, was heard in London in April 1933 and the three movements, with the Gavotte and final Gigue were first performed together in November in America. The following year brought a concert tour there in which he was able to give the first performance of his new Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. The imaginative arrangement of Schubert's song Wohin, from Die Schöne Müllerin, was made in 1925, the year in which, following the sudden death of his son-in-law Prince pyotr Volkonsky after barely a year of marriage, he set up a publishing house, primarily for the benefit of his daughters. The song becomes a splendid example of the transcriber's art, preserving, with the most delicate of additions, the full flavour of the original, as the stream flows on, questioned by the young lover, the miller's apprentice. The demanding and idiomatic arrangement of the Scherzo from Mendelssohn's incidental music for Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream was made in 1933 and first heard at San Antonio, in Texas, on 23
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