Piano Concerto No.1 in F sharp minor, Op.1

Rachmaninov had great affection for his First Piano Concerto. Although it was written when he was still a student at the Moscow Conservatoire and was unsatisfactory for a variety of reasons in its original version, the mature composer clearly considered that its material was entirely worthy of him. He seriously thought of revising the score in 1908 but discarded the idea, starting work on his Third Piano Concerto in D minor instead. He picked it up again in 1917 when, amid the distractions of the October Revolution, he would have found it difficult to concentrate on more creative work. So in the present version many details in the scoring for both piano and orchestra and some aspects of the construction are applied to thematic material conceived as long as 26 years earlier.

Rachmaninov at the age of 44 clearly felt no embarrassment about the 17-year-old student composer’s admiration for Tchaikovsky, whose Fourth Symphony echoes in the brass fanfare in the opening bars of his First Piano Concerto. If he was aware of the echo – as he surely must have been – he probably told himself that, although he uses the fanfare to articulate the construction in much the same way as Tchaikovsky does, he attaches nothing like the same symbolic meaning to it. Besides, it is immediately associated with a dramatic cascade of piano chords designed to draw attention to the virtuoso aspect of the work.

The first subject of the first movement, an arching melody introduced in a slower tempo by violins, is pure Rachmaninov. There is a similar yearning melody in the corresponding movement of the Second Piano Concerto in C minor, although in that case it is held back until the second subject. When Rachmaninov comes to the second subject in this work, after a brilliantly written scherzando episode, he offers another melody of much the same kind - introduced by violins again but this time with a decorative keyboard counterpoint. If there is any confusion of thematic identity it is all resolved in a towering cadenza, which reviews the thematic material from the fanfare onwards and forcibly proclaims the authority of the first subject.

As in the Second Piano Concerto, Rachmaninov is careful to relate the three movements. A solo horn takes a prominent phrase from the first movement to introduce the Andante and the piano incorporates the same phrase in the lyrical main theme in D major. No more than an intermezzo, this is an unambitious construction with little development and no long-term change of key: the variety is in the scoring, as when the main theme is sweetly reintroduced by violins and cellos against a background of staccato chords combined with legato arpeggios on the piano.

An intermezzo as the central movement of three would be fine if the last were of a size to match that of the first. Strangely, however, in revising the structure of the finale Rachmaninov reduced its stature quite drastically. After an opening orchestral gesture which usefully relates to the first-movement fanfare, there is a delightfully capricious first theme for the piano and, at a slower tempo, an ardently romantic melody for violins – the last item destined, surely, for greater things. But in its concise new form the finale has no room for an expansive climax: although the playful opening material is recalled, its passionate companion is not, and the ending is as briskly achieved as it is brilliantly scored.