Music: Sergei Rachmaninoff's perceived fame as a concert pianist has constantly been challenged by his fame as a composer, and this book makes it clear that it was always the case during his life that these two elements of his creative output competed with rather than complemented each other.
From his earliest days as a student in Moscow until his final days in the US, Rachmaninoff the composer's remarkable pianistic abilities, while providing him with an income, took time away from Rachmaninoff the pianist's remarkable compositional abilities. In an era of specialisation, Rachmaninoff was one of the few musicians of the 20th century who inhabited both worlds.
He was also one of the first artists to capitalise on the developing recording technology of the day as a means of capturing performances which would otherwise be lost, using media such as recording pianos, wax cylinders and electrical recordings, as each technology came and went. But this aspect of the book was a little wanting because, having checked that I had read the title correctly, the first thing I did when I opened the book was to go to the back to see was there a CD of examples of Rachmaninoff's recordings. Alas, there was none. In a book which devotes a significant part of its bulk to discussing many aspects of the recordings of possibly one of the greatest performing artists of all time, this seems to me to be an error of omission.
There is a discography at the back, but this doesn't give information as to the availability of the recordings, and so, for those readers interested in exploring this aspect of both this book and Rachmaninoff's output, one should have to hand recordings of the master such as A Window In Time, in which Wayne Stahnke has translated many of the old recordings of Rachmaninoff's performances of his own and others' works into a format which was playable by a modified Bosendorfer, with remarkable results.
The Rachmaninoff story is easily told: the composer-pianist left Russia after the revolution, having lost all his estates, and eventually settled in the US, where his fame as a pianist allowed him to live fairly comfortably as a performer of mostly his own works until he died of cancer in 1945. It really is quite unromantic, which may be a source of disappointment to audiences who are ravished by the emotional response they feel when listening to the unashamed expressivity of some of the man's compositional output.
There is the famous story of the hypnosis sessions which he had with Dr Nikolai Dahl to overcome his discouragement at the bad reception his first symphony had received. This story is treated with admirable restraint. The key thing is that Rachmaninoff's response to the incident has been perceived as symptomatic of his morose personality (Stravinsky famously described him as a "six-and-a-half-foot scowl") whereas Harrison is often at pains to point out that Rachmaninoff's apparent bleakness was really a form of self-deprecating humour.
A difficult aspect of the book is in the discussion of the music itself: having said in the introduction that ". . . one must be aware of analysing the score rather than the musical experience", Harrison then overcompensates and gives the reader long-winded descriptive passages of "musical experience" (presumably his) in place of any discussion of the score. While these read very well as programme notes, they are purely that: descriptive accounts of musical events as they unfold in time in whatever piece is under discussion, an approach which is ultimately redundant because if the reader reads it while they are listening, then they don't hear Rachmaninoff's music, and if they listen to Rachmaninoff's music while they read it, then they don't need to read a description of it.
This approach works extremely well, however, in the discussion of the recordings because all the variations in approach taken in different versions of the same piece can be compared and contrasted in a manner which very successfully communicates the subtleties of differentiation and shading, making the book a useful addition to the literature on someone who has finally become one of the most respected, if retrospective, 20th-century composers.
Fergus Johnston is a composer. He is currently on retreat in Bulgaria writing, among other things, a piece commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra for its April 2006 Brahmsfest
Rachmaninoff: Life, Works, Recordings By Max Harrison Continuum, 422pp. £25