Valery Gergiev and Denis Matsuev

PERFORMERS:
Soloists: Denis Matsuev (piano)
The Mariinsky Orchestra
Conductor: Valery Gergiev

PROGRAMME:
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Piano Concerto No 1 in F Sharp Minor, Op. 1

Pyotr Tchaikovsky
Symphony No 6 in B Minor, Op 74 Pathétique

Rachmaninoff was made of steel and gold; steel in his hands and gold in his heart.
Josef Hofmann

As a seventeen-year-old student of the Moscow Conservatoire, Sergei Rachmaninoff began work on his Piano Concerto No 1 in F Sharp Minor in the autumn of 1890. The concerto was completed in 1891 and became the first work that the young composer awarded an opus number. A performance by the composer of the first movement of the concerto together with a student orchestra under the baton of Vasily Safonov (17 March 1892, Small Hall of the Noble Assembly in Moscow) left the audience entranced. The principal theme of the concerto’s first movement speaks of true Rachmaninoff in terms of passion, drawing us with both its romantic anxiousness and its profound soulfulness. The lyrical slow movement – the glittering finale which combines scherzo and hymn-like qualities – forms a prologue to many works in the mature composer’s style.
Let us examine the opinion of one contemporary; years later, Alexander Ossovsky recalled “I remember that passionate and stormy impulse that shook the entire concert hall, that impulse with which, after two bars of orchestral unison, Rachmaninoff furiously threw himself at the keyboard of the piano with a rapid flow of octaves in an extreme fortissimo... The monumental range, the scale, the dramatic tension, the fervent pathétique, the captivating and songful lyricism, the imperious power of the rhythm... Here everything foretells of Rachmaninoff as the composer of the brilliant Second and Third Piano Concerti.”
The composer produced a second version of the concerto in 1917, one that has been performed ever since.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky admitted in a letter in 1889 that “I really want to write some grandiose symphony that would be ... the crowning glory of my creative career...” Fate was to be generous enough to ensure that this wish of the composer would come true in the literal sense: a few days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony in St Petersburg (16 October 1893 under the composer’s baton) Tchaikovsky died.
“Something strange is happening with this symphony!” the composer wrote one week before his sudden death which stunned all. “It’s not that I don’t like it, rather it bewilders me somewhat. As for me myself, I am more proud of it than any other of my works.” However, at just the second performance of the symphony, alas already after Tchaikovsky’s death, on 6 November 1893 under the baton of Eduard Nápravník, the work earned the praise it deserved.
Tchaikovsky’s famous words from another letter are significant: “Without any exaggeration I have put my entire soul into this symphony...”
Boris Asafiev called the symphony “A tragic document of the age”. This piercing lyrical confession burns with its bitter truth: human life is not threatened by perfidious and vengeful destiny or fatum – as it is in Tchaikovsky’s preceding Fourth and Fifth Symphonies. Death is rooted in life, which, with all its tense collisions, leads to one inevitable conclusion – departure into nothingness.

Iosif Raiskin