Rachmaninoff: Symphony No. 2

Chronique

There are two sides to the music of Sergei Rachmaninoff. There's the lush melodist who took Russian Romanticism well into the middle of the 20th century and compelled attention even as other composers were going in wholly different directions, and, though it's less recognized, there's the technician. The master orchestrator who rivaled Tchaikovsky in sustaining a musical arc over vast periods and in the variety of devices he used to do so. It is too simple to say that "Russian" Rachmaninoff emphasizes the first, and "British" Rachmaninoff the second, but it's accurate enough for Sir Simon Rattle, who has conducted a lot of Rachmaninoff and has already recorded the Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 twice, once on video. Those who love Rachmaninoff for the big tunes and heavily nostalgic chains of suspensions might look elsewhere, perhaps to an oldie-but-goodie recording of the work by these same forces, the London Symphony Orchestra, led by Gennady Rozhdestvensky. However, the inner workings of the symphony have rarely been as clearly defined as they are here. Listen to the slow movement, which won't make one cry but which sustains its long line superbly. Feasibly, this is a result of the fact that Rattle conducted the work from memory; more likely, it's just general familiarity and a satisfying feeling of delving deeply into this work that is still hard to pin down, despite its supposed accessibility. The performance was spliced together from two live LSO evenings, and the orchestra's engineering team has captured Rattle's carefully wrought balances and his subtly ominous rumblings of the double basses at the beginning very well.
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