Rachmaninoff

… Each time, from the very first ring of the bell, you feel how Russia rises to her full height.
Nikolai Karlovich Medtner

Rachmaninoff overcame the severe psychical crisis caused by the disastrous performance of his First Symphony after several years of troubled silence. The Second Piano Concerto signalled the composer’s genuine “return to health” and bore witness to the mighty ascent of his creative powers. As a sign of gratitude, Rachmaninoff dedicated one of his greatest works to Nikolai Vladimirovich Dahl, the doctor who cured him.
The performance of just the second part of the Concerto met with a delighted response from Moscow’s music lovers. According to accounts of contemporaries, Sergei Ivanovich Taneyev cried during the performance, calling Rachmaninoff’s music “brilliant”. The full premiere of the Concerto, which took place in Moscow on 27 October 1901, also proved a triumph; the composer performed the solo and the orchestra was conducted by Alexander Ilyich Siloti. The monumental nature of form, the variety and the power of the full-sounding piano score “competing” with the polychromatic orchestral palette imbue the Concerto with a truly symphonic scale.
Everything in this pearl of Russian classical music – the “bell-like” quality, the broad gulf of lyrical themes, the pressure of resilient and free rhythms, the high waves of the culminations and the peaceful light of instances of contemplative peace – all of this is executed with the most incredible beauty, and it all leads to the final vertex – the powerful apotheosis, performed in delight and exultation.
Iosif Raiskin

The poem The Bells for mixed chorus, three soloists (soprano, tenor and baritone) and orchestra was completed by Rachmaninoff in 1913. Interestingly, Rachmaninoff had initially planned to compose a symphony, but it so happened that at the time he received an anonymous letter with a request to read Balmont’s translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem which was attached to the letter and which, the letter stated, was eminently suitable for music and should be of interest to the composer. The name of the letter’s author only became known after Rachmaninoff’s death – it was the cellist Mikhail Bukinik’s student Maria Danilova.
The content of the poem did, in fact, immediately rouse Rachmaninoff’s interest and his initial idea changed instantaneously. The Bells is reminiscent of a symphony in terms of structure (it is a four-part cycle), although it is closer to a cantata.
The entire work, from the first movement to the last, is an irrepressible advance towards catastrophe, from light towards darkness. Each of the four movements creates a scene of human life, from birth to death, and in each the chime of the bells reigns supreme.
The poem The Bells bears the composer’s dedication “To my friend Willem Mengelberg and his Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam.”