Sticky Notes: The Classical Music Podcast - Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 (Live with the Aalborg Symphony)

Rachmaninoff's relationship with the symphony as a genre was famously complicated. The catastrophic premiere of his First Symphony is legendary: a badly prepared orchestra, a possibly drunk conductor, and critics who were ready to plunge a knife into the young composer's self-confidence and self-worth. The performance and the reviews that followed practically destroyed him, and it took three years before he began to compose again. His comeback piece was, amazingly, the Second Piano Concerto, which catapulted him to instant celebrity. Mobbed wherever he went, he desperately wanted peace and quiet so that he could compose. He took his family to Dresden, both to escape the adoring crowds and to escape the political tensions of 1905 and 1906, tensions that would eventually result in the Russian Revolution (and Rachmaninoff's permanent exile from Russia) in 1917. In Dresden, Rachmaninoff began to compose furiously, and he found the confidence to return to the symphony exactly ten years after the infamous disaster of the First. What he came up with, his second symphony, is certainly his most popular symphony, an epic journey of symphonic brilliance that never fails to make audiences all over the world swoon. Today we're going to talk about that quintessential Rachmaninoff sound, the epic sweep of the piece, and Rachmaninoff's highly underrated compositional abilities. This isn't just a piece of gorgeous melodies (though don't worry, we'll hear plenty of those). It is a piece of great craft that went at least some way toward exorcising Rachmaninoff's compositional demons.