New Year’s Day 2016. On BBC Four up pops a new Tom Service documentary on the life and works of Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninov, featuring a multiplicity of resonant locations in and outside Russia. Slowly a veil is lifted. I’m totting up so many favourite works treasured over the years. The thought stirs that I’ve been slow to accommodate the notion that a composer who wrote so much of such range and such quality surely deserves to be regarded as a true 20th-century great.
Many a commentator has held back from that ‘great composer’ verdict. Yes, those distinctive melodies and harmonies may be wistfully winning, but didn’t Rachmaninov betray the ongoing march of compositional progress by trading in a ripe, melancholic Romanticism past its sell-by date? Barbed critical comment pursued him during his lifetime, detractors dismissing his music as ‘artificial and gushing’ or owing more ‘to the salon than the Steppes’. His Fourth Piano Concerto was given the ultimate raspberry from the New York critic Pitts Sanborn: ‘long winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry’. Rachmaninov reckoned critics were ‘always waiting to devour me’. Thankfully, audiences have made up their own minds.
AS THINGS STAND, in this 150th anniversary of Rachmaninov’s birth, signs have been emerging that critical opinion is shifting. Rebecca Mitchell, one of the composer’s latest biographers, detects there’s ‘a movement among scholars towards a more serious consideration of his music.
