Then “Liebeslied” was Kreisler transcribed by Rachmaninoff, in this virtuoso role following the footsteps of somebody like Liszt. And in “Corelli” — the theme, it seems, he got from Kreisler — Rachmaninoff wrote what is for me maybe the most significant of the large-scale solo pieces. It’s one of his few outbursts, compositionally, after the Revolution, written in exile. I find it very searching, and at the same time very dark and sad. By the coda there’s sort of no music; it just disintegrates like something broken up, floating apart in space.
You end with a transcription of your own.
I wanted to pay homage to this tradition of pianists being transcribers. “In the Silence of the Secret Night” is a song that I’ve loved since childhood, and there’s a very opulent transcription in layers and layers of fantastic and inventive pianistic dress. But I thought for this somewhat more innocent, earlier material, I wanted to dress it up circa the same period of the Second Piano Concerto, and not in the period of the Fourth Concerto or the “Paganini” Rhapsody.
What is your response to criticisms — then and now — of Rachmaninoff not being sufficiently innovative?
By that measure, you could discard a lot of great composers. You do hear him responding to the changing compositional language of, say, Stravinsky, and to jazz and what he hears in America. But in addition to these criticisms, there is also the psychological problem of certain listeners that if it’s popular it cannot be good.
The criteria of what makes high art can be discussed or disputed, but he does undergo modulations of what music and art can mean. He experiments with technology, and bridges Europe, Russia and America, very much searching for answers.
Based on what you just said, let’s do a case study with the Second Piano Concerto, because it is both incredibly popular and skillfully composed.
