Symphony No.1 in D minor, Op.13

The first performance of Rachmaninov’s First Symphony - conducted by an uncaring, uncomprehending and apparently drunken Alexander Glazunov in St Petersburg in March 1897 - was a disaster. “When the indescribable torture of the performance had at last come to an end, I was a different man,” the composer recalled many years later. The torture, aggravated by vicious criticism in the press, was actually so traumatic that Rachmaninov suffered a kind of creative paralysis. He was unable to write anything of any consequence until as long as three years later when, after months of hypnotherapy with the eminent neurologist Dr Nikolay Dahl, he got to work on his Second Piano Concerto.

Given the success of the already famous Prelude in C sharp minor and his student opera Aleko, which had won the enthusiastic approval of no less a musician than Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov could scarcely have expected to experience such a comprehensive failure with his First Symphony. Indeed, bearing in mind the quality of the score, he had every reason to expect the opposite. An extraordinary achievement for a composer who was still only twenty-two when he completed it, the Symphony in D minor is a highly accomplished work which, as one or two external clues seem to confirm, was clearly inspired by an intense personal experience of some kind. It was dedicated to the gypsy wife of a close friend, Anna Lodyzhensky, and it apparently bore on its title page the biblical quotation, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay.” Whatever it meant to the composer - and there is a lyrical, perhaps even amorous gypsy element in the music as well as an obsessive vengeance motif - the work was neither performed again nor published in his lifetime. The score having disappeared some time after Rachmaninov’s departure from Russia in 1917, tonight’s performance is based on a reconstruction put together from the original orchestral parts discovered in the St Petersburg Conservatoire fifty years after that first performance.

The Symphony in D minor begins with a jolt - a group of three notes rising on an upbeat and one falling on the downbeat - which is to recur dozens of times throughout the work and which can be equivalent to a punch, a skip, a plea, a caress, whatever the composer wants to make of it. In this case, thrust forward by woodwind and horns in the fff opening bars of the short Grave introduction, it lends grim emphasis to the first appearance of the vengeance theme on heavily down-bowed strings in unison.

Closely related to the medieval Dies Irae tune, a symbol of divine retribution that meant much to Rachmaninov, the vengeance theme is rephrased by clarinet as the distinctively Russian first subject of the following Allegro ma non troppo. The only other theme of any significance in the exposition of the first movement is the exotically lyrical gypsy-style melody tenderly introduced by a solo oboe after strings have slowed the tempo down to a thoughtful Moderato. Rachmaninov makes comparatively little of this second subject, which interests him less at this stage than the jolt motif and the vengeance-derived first subject. Beginning with a screech and a brisk fugue, he proceeds to develop them both with immense melodic resource and brilliantly colourful orchestration. After the recall of the second subject, now on violins and violas but in its original Moderato tempo, he finds still more energy in the other two themes as he races them through an ever quicker coda.

The Allegro animato begins with less of a jolt. The same group of notes is there, on muted violas in the opening bars, but, like the rest of the material in the outer sections of this fleeting scherzo movement, it keeps a low profile. The main theme, a gracefully waltzing variant of the Dies Irae tune, makes a similarly elusive appearance on the first entry of the first violins. Occasionally the flickering orchestral sparks flare into a brief blaze but the bright lights are reserved for the slower middle section, where the jolt and the Dies Irae motif are much in evidence, the latter converted at one point into a delightful violin solo over pizzicato strings.

The Larghetto is constructed on much the same lines as the preceding scherzo, beginning with a jolt on muted violas and including a contrasting middle section. In this case, however, the opening material - based on dreamy woodwind melody derived from the gypsy-style second subject of the first movement - is rather different on its return towards the end. It is as though the experience of the middle section, with its sinister brass harmonies repeated in syncopated rhythms and its increasingly heavy jolts on lower strings, demanded a more emotional reaction. The main theme is recalled on solo strings followed by still more overt references to the second subject of the first movement on first violins and a big climax with the Dies Irae tune transformed into an ecstatic commentary on two horns.

Sure enough, the last movement begins with a jolt, a severe one. The atmosphere has changed, however - as is immediately obvious from the brilliant brass fanfares and the Dies Irae tune now transformed into an exuberant march on multi-stopped strings in resplendent D major harmonies. The lyrical counterpart to the march is a rhapsodic melody, derived from the second subject of the first movement and arching high in a wide sweep on violins and violas. After all that, it would seem that we must be in for a triumphant conclusion and, indeed, although there are occasional warnings to the contrary, the whole orchestra makes a frenzied Shostakovich-like progress to that apparent goal - only to be cut off by a chilling gong stroke. The shock provokes an elegiac reflection on the Dies Irae tune and an ending that, far from celebrating the closing D major harmonies, jolts into them with grim determination.