When I was a music student my tutors were scathing about Rachmaninov. To that generation of academics, obsessed by Schoenberg, Webern, Boulez and all the other serialists, Rachmaninov was not just an anomaly – a full-blooded Romantic composer marooned, like a beached whale, in the anti-Romantic 20th century – but an irrelevance. What could that lusciously scored, melodysaturated music possibly say about the modern age?
Today, older if not wiser, I realise that Rachmaninov not only