Philadelphia Orchestra’s Russian program

Aram Khachaturian’s Piano Concerto in D-flat was massacred by an under-rehearsed orchestra in its 1936 debut, and the young Khachaturian was observed after the performance sobbing in despair with his arms around a tree. Fortunately, a proper rendition redressed the initial mishap soon after, and the concerto established the composer’s reputation while also inaugurating the most productive decade of his career. I’ll bet he didn’t forget that tree, though.

The concerto was once a favorite, but now it has pretty much fallen out of the repertory outside Russia. (It was last performed in Philadelphia 66 years ago, under Eugene Ormandy.) It’s not likely to become a staple again, but it’s certainly worth hearing more than once or twice a century, with its strong colors, driving rhythms, and lyrical slow movement.

The solo part is a virtuoso’s delight in its treacherous fingerwork and furiously overlapping chords. The veteran French pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet dispatched it with suitable verve and command but also with a touch of Ravel-like restraint that kept the music from going over the top.

Conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin began the program with the finale of Alexander Glazunov’s ballet score, The Seasons, which served in effect as an overture. It’s one of Glazunov’s most felicitous works, full of his melodic gift and orchestral wizardry.

Tolstoy’s insult

Glazunov is one of the more puzzling figures in musical history. He began as an astonishingly precocious young composer, hailed as a genius in his early teens, with a Mozart-like capacity to reproduce scores he’d heard only once from memory. His career as a composer was certainly more than respectable, but it largely petered out in his mid-40s, and thereafter he wrote only sparingly, his Romantic style no longer at home in the world of modern music (although he remained an influential pedagogue and nurtured many composers with whose works he had little affinity).

Glazunov also drank prodigiously — and that weakness, combined with an indifferent podium technique, led to a disastrous premiere of the young Sergei Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in 1897. The press savaged the score, and a deeply depressed Rachmaninoff largely stopped composing for the next three years. It didn’t help when Leo Tolstoy, after hearing Rachmaninoff perform his music during this interval, asked whether “such music was needed by anyone.” Finally, a psychotherapist named Nikolai Dahl, to whom we all owe a debt of gratitude, persuaded Rachmaninoff to resume his compositional career.

Rachmaninoff’s return to the lists was his Second Piano Concerto, an immediate triumph and a work that has never lost its popularity. Six years later, he produced a well-received Second Symphony, and with these successes he didn’t look back on the unhappy episode of the First Symphony. He made no effort to have it performed again in his lifetime, and the score was believed lost when he died in 1943. The parts were rediscovered two years later, however, in the archives of the Leningrad Conservatory, and Rachmaninoff’s great champion Ormandy introduced it in America in 1948. It didn’t really take, though, remaining in the shadow of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony and, to a lesser extent, his Third.

Fleeing the Bolsheviks

I was astonished myself when I first heard the score, and I’ve come to believe it the last great Russian symphony of the 19th century and a worthy successor to Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique. The Verizon Hall audience seemed of a like mind last week and gave Nézet-Séguin’s vigorous performance a warm ovation.

The First is a large-scaled work, with each of its four movements beginning with the same motif in altered guises. Its wealth of melody seems unending, its development shows considerable invention, and its orchestration is masterly. Tchaikovsky’s influence is palpable, of course, but there’s nothing imitative about the music. Its melodic and rhythmic signatures are distinctive, the colors fresh and vital. This is not only top-drawer Rachmaninoff but also essential to understanding the development of his oeuvre as a whole.

Ironically, Rachmaninoff’s own career paralleled Glazunov’s in some ways. The First Symphony is Rachmaninoff’s Opus 13; he had reached the Op. 39 Etudes tableaux by 1917, when he was 44. That, of course, was the year of the Russian Revolution.

Glazunov stayed in Russia, and from his conservatory position he was able to get his students— Shostakovich among them— properly fed in the semi-starvation conditions of the early 1920s. Rachmaninoff chose exile in the West and had to support himself by extensive concertizing, which left him little time or concentration for composing. His Op. 40, the Fourth Piano Concerto, didn’t appear for a decade, and it was prompted by the need he felt to expand his own repertory.

His new homeland

All told, Rachmaninoff would write only six works in his last 26 years, much as Glazunov’s production largely dried up in his later life although for different reasons. These six are all masterworks, which can only lead us to wonder what Rachmaninoff might have given us under other circumstances. Prokofiev, too, went into exile after the Russian Revolution, and like Rachmaninoff supported himself by concertizing, but with a younger man’s energy and adaptability he remained productive as a composer.

The melancholy we associate with Rachmaninoff’s music was also stamped on his features in the pictures taken of him in his years abroad; he never seemed to smile. It was Prokofiev who, overcome at last by homesickness, returned to Russia in 1933, but for Rachmaninoff his native land was a closed world he could keep alive only in his head. If he found a new homeland anywhere, it was ultimately with the Philadelphia Orchestra, with which he formed a uniquely intimate relationship and whose sound, he said, was in his mind as he composed.

Rachmaninoff’s old orchestra did him proud in its performances of his First Symphony this past week, with the rich, shimmering, and wonderfully pliant sound of its strings in particular on display. He still has a home here. But that fact rendered the week’s other local event — the School Reform Commission’s revocation of its contract with the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers— that much uglier. You don’t sustain the civic culture on which great orchestras depend by shortchanging public education — or, for that matter, by dragging the local orchestra itself through bankruptcy. Russia had a revolution for a reason.