Name: S.RACHMANINOFF: Piano concerto no.4 op.40 - I MVT - A.B.MICHELANGELI | Videos | Gan Jing World
Uploaded: 2022-09-16T17:30:00.000Z
Duration: 9 min 32 s
Description: SONG: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Minor, Op. 40: I. Allegro vivace ARTIST:Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Ettore Gracis, The Philharmonia Ettore Gracis, conductor... | Videos | Gan Jing World

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SONG: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Minor, Op. 40: I. Allegro vivace
ARTIST:Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Ettore Gracis, The Philharmonia

Ettore Gracis, conductor, 1957

PHOTOS: Russia, the red square, the celestial battle prophecy.

Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40 is a major work by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, completed in 1926. The work exists in three versions. Following its unsuccessful premiere (1st version), the composer made cuts and other amendments before publishing it in 1928 (2nd version). With continued lack of success, he withdrew the work, eventually revising and republishing it in 1941 (3rd version, most generally performed today). The original manuscript version was released in 2000 by the Rachmaninoff Estate to be published and recorded. The work is dedicated to Nikolai Medtner, who in turn dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to Rachmaninoff the following year.
Form

Compared with its predecessors, the Fourth Concerto contains sharper thematic profiles along with a refinement of textures in keyboard and orchestra. These qualities do not lead to greater simplicity but to a different sort of complexity. It was also a continuation of Rachmaninoff's long-range creative growth: the Third Concerto and the recomposed First Concerto were less heavily orchestrated than the Second Concerto. In keeping with its general character, the Fourth Concerto is lighter still, yet more oblique.

The concerto is in three movements:

    Allegro vivace (G minor)
    Largo (C major)
    Allegro vivace (G minor → D-Flat Major → G major)

Rachmaninoff had already been making a more extensive use of short thematic motifs and strong rhythmic patterns in his Op. 32 Preludes, in place of what was called the "unmentionable restlessness" that made his work, especially the concertos, a distressing experience for some musicians. This refinement of musical language, especially in orchestration, went back at least to The Bells and a more astringent tone was already noticeable in songs like "The Raising of Lazarus", Op. 34, No. 6.

Modern classical music

What Rachmaninoff heard around him proved that politics was not the only thing that had changed since the October Revolution. Even if he did not like most of what he heard, he was at least aware of what Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Les Six were writing.[4] Even before the Revolution, in 1916, Russian critic Leonid Sabaneyev noticed a change in Rachmaninoff's style when the composer played eight of his nine Op. 39 Études-Tableaux:

This great talent is now in the period of search. Evidently the individuality originally formed by the composer (the culmination of which I consider to be the extraordinary Second Concerto) has for some reason ceased to satisfy the composer.

    The searches of a great talent are always interesting. Although personally I cannot consider Rachmaninov a musical phenomenon of the highest order … nevertheless one senses in him a tremendous inner power, a potential that some barrier prevents from emerging fully … his artistic personality contains the promise of something greater than he has yet given us.[5]

Other critics also noticed a new angularity and pungency in these études, along with a more severe, concentrated and deepened mode of expression.[6] This was influenced in part by Rachmaninoff's study of Scriabin's music for the memorial recitals he played in 1915;[7] this study bore further fruit in the works Rachmaninoff wrote after leaving Russia.

Had Rachmaninoff stayed in Russia, and the Bolsheviks' rise to power never taken place, the Fourth Piano Concerto probably would have been premiered around 1919, eight years earlier than its actual unveiling. It is also possible that in the fertile creative ground of the composer's estate of Ivanovka, where many of his major pieces grew to fruition, the concerto might have become a wholly different composition, albeit probably no less adventurous than the work we know today