Rachmaninoff at Blossom with Kochanovsky and Lugansky

 

Daniel and I didn't follow our normal summer concert routine yesterday.  Instead of a leisurely pre-concert dinner at Mexibachi Grill near Blossom Music Center, we joined his family in Lorain for a lovely birthday party before racing to Cuyahoga Falls for last night’s concert.  It's fun to mix things up.  Several weeks ago, as I booked tickets for the concert, I fretted over which seats to get – forgetting the giant video screens that now make such considerations superfluous.  As the concert proceeded, Daniel and I found ourselves looking at the screens more than the stage. 

The Cleveland Orchestra was never considered to be a “Rachmaninoff” orchestra, in contrast to the Philadelphia Orchestra which the composer considered to be the world’s finest.  But Sergei Rachmaninoff had worked with the Cleveland’s first two conductors, Nikolai Sokoloff and Artur Rodziński – and when the former was preparing to make the first-ever recording of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony, the composer collaborated with Sokoloff over cuts to the music to fit the work onto the allotted number of 78rpm discs.  Despite dated sonics, the 1928 recording holds up very well.

Fortunately, recording technology and the music world have evolved so that Rachmaninoff’s works are generally performed intact these days.  The opening work on the program, his Third Concerto, was performed complete – as it should be.  Soloist Nikolai Lugansky, making his Cleveland Orchestra debut, delivered a cohesive, well-nigh technically flawless performance – “like butter,” as some would say.  Conceptually, his approach to the work was very much like the composer’s own recording, but a tad more relaxed and, as mentioned, without any disfiguring cuts.  As with the composer and his chosen successor, Vladimir Horowitz, Lugansky chose the faster, quicksilver cadenza.   Conductor Stanislav Kochanovsky, also making his Cleveland Orchestra debut, was with the soloist for every step of the journey – urging the orchestra toward more extroverted playing than is usually heard from them.  At the work’s conclusion, they received an immediate ovation and were recalled several times, with Lugansky furnishing an encore: Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in C minor, Op. 23, No. 7.

The Symphony No. 1, which followed intermission, was not as successful.  The heart of the problem lay with the work itself – it’s easily the weakest of the composer’s three Symphonies.  Indeed, the merciless laceration the work received following its premiere in 1897 – with critic César Cui denouncing it as suited to a “conservatory in Hell” and likening it to “the Ten Plagues of Egypt” – sent the composer into a depression so severe that he suffered from a three-year writer’s block which could only be resolved by hypnotherapy.  The work lay forgotten, its score believed to be lost until surfacing in 1945, two years after the composer’s death.  Listening with modern ears and having heard the work numerous times in recordings, it’s obvious it owes much to Tchaikovsky and Borodin in orchestration.  The Dies Irae theme, which is referenced in numerous of Rachmaninoff’s work, is heard constantly throughout – transformed from minor to major – to the point of over-repetition.   Kochanovsky and the orchestra delivered a polished rendition of the work, but audience members were seen leaving the pavilion as it proceeded. 

Yours truly before the concert.