Symphony No. 1
A bold, dark-hued first symphony built on the Dies irae chant, driven by a young composer determined to prove himself. Its fierce energy was buried for decades by one catastrophic premiere.
Rachmaninoff wrote his First Symphony in 1895 at Ivanovka, his family's country estate, working long days over many months on a score he found unusually difficult to shape. He was in his early twenties and ambitious, building the whole work from short motivic cells and the medieval Dies irae plainchant, a melody of death that would haunt his music for the rest of his life. The result is tightly argued and often violent, closer to a network of transformed ideas than a string of tunes.
The premiere in St. Petersburg in 1897 destroyed him. Alexander Glazunov conducted, badly and by several accounts drunk, with too little rehearsal and unauthorized cuts. Rachmaninoff fled before it ended. César Cui, an influential critic hostile to Moscow composers, wrote that the music left an evil impression through its broken rhythms and vagueness of form. The wound was deep enough to stop Rachmaninoff composing for roughly three years, until treatment with the physician Nikolai Dahl restored his confidence.
The manuscript vanished during the upheaval of 1917. Only the surviving orchestral parts, held in Leningrad, allowed the score to be reconstructed in the 1940s, bringing this fierce, brass-heavy work back to life long after its composer had given up on it.
Movements
Recordings coming soon
The individual movements will be uploaded here.