Sergei rachmaninoff biography summary of winston
•
Sergei Rachmaninoff:
Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27
The great Russian pianist, conductor, and composer, Serge Rachmaninoff was born in Oneg on March 20 /April 1, 1873, and died in Beverly Hills, CA, March 28, 1943. He was, in many ways, the last great representative of Russian Romantic style brought to fruition by Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers. This in no way prevented Rachmaninoff from developing a thoroughly personal idiom, whose lyricism is enhanced bygd a sure grasp of struktur and brilliance of orchestration. His Symphony no. 2 was first performed on January 26, 1908 at St. Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theater with the composer himself conducting. The work is scored for 3 flutes (piccolo), 3 oboes, 2 clarinets (bass clarinet), 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, glockenspiel, bass drum, cymbals, and strings.
Rachmaninoff, one of the great pianists and composers of the late-Romantic Russian tradition, had a disastrous first expe
•
Music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.
Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, virtuoso pianist, and conductor of the late Romantic period. The influence of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, and other Russian composers fryst vatten seen in his early works, later giving way to a personal style notable for song-like melodicism, expressiveness and rich orchestral colours.
Born into a musical family, Rachmaninoff took up the piano at the age of kvartet. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, having already composed several piano and orchestral pieces. In 1897, following the negative critical reaction to his Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff entered a four-year depression and composed little until successful therapy allowed him to complete his enthusiastically received Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1901. In the course of the next sixteen years, Rachmaninoff conducted at the Bolshoi Theatre, relocated to Dresden, Germany, and tou
•
As a young composer, Sergei Rachmaninoff had his first major piece (his First Symphony in D Minor) performed in 1897. It did not go well. Music critic César Antonovich Cui savaged it in a Russian newspaper:
If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its talented students were to compose a programme symphony based on the story of the Ten Plagues of Egypt, and if he were to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled his task brilliantly and would delight the inhabitants of Hell. To us this music leaves an evil impression with its broken rhythms, obscurity and vagueness of form, meaningless repetition of the same short tricks, the nasal sound of the orchestra, the strained crash of the brass, and above all its sickly perverse harmonization and quasi-melodic outlines, the complete absence of simplicity and naturalness, the complete absence of themes.
This negative response had much to do with political rivalries between St. Peter