Sep 1, 2017
Raymond Bisha introduces Boris Giltburg’s latest album of music by Sergei Rachmaninov that features the Études-tableaux Op. 33 and his ever-popular Piano Concerto No. 2. The latter charts a dramatic course: from the passion, darkness and pain of the first movement, through the dreamy idyll of the second, to the unequivocal victory of the finale. This overview might indeed reflect the path of Rachmaninov’s own life: his depression and inability to continue composing following the disastrous première of his First Symphony (ruined by an apparently drunken Glazunov on the conductor’s podium) and his fight to overcome it with the help of a hypnotherapist, one Dr Dahl, to whom the Second Piano Concerto was dedicated.