Piano Concerto No. 1 in F-sharp minor, Op. 1

Program notes

About the Work

The First Piano Concerto is Rachmaninoff’s Opus 1, the first piece he thought worth a number. He wrote it in 1890 and 1891, still a student at the Moscow Conservatory. In March 1891 he told a friend that two movements were written and the third composed in his head; he finished the score on 6 July, a few months after his eighteenth birthday. It was his second attempt at a concerto, after one in C minor that he had begun and abandoned in 1889, and he dedicated it to his cousin and teacher Alexander Siloti.

Students were encouraged to work from a model, and his was the Piano Concerto by Grieg, which Siloti had been practising in the Rachmaninoff household the summer before. The debt is plain in the way the piece starts. Rachmaninoff played the first movement with the Conservatory orchestra under Vasily Safonov on 17 March 1892, and that may have been the only time he performed the concerto in its original form.

He soon came to think it was not good enough. In 1908 he wrote to a friend that three of his pieces frightened him, the First Concerto among them, and that he would like to see them in a corrected, decent form. He finally did the work in the revolutionary year of 1917, shortly before he left Russia for good. By then he had written his Second and Third Concertos, and the revision was thorough: he thinned the textures of both piano and orchestra, cut material that had made the original diffuse, rewrote long stretches and gave the finale a new opening. Nearly all the themes are those of 1891. The craftsmanship is that of 1917.

The listings for these concerts do not say which version is played. The 1917 revision is Rachmaninoff’s last word on the piece, and it is the text described here. Rachmaninoff was proud of it and puzzled that audiences were not more interested. ‘I have rewritten my First Concerto; it is really good now’, he told Alfred Swan. ‘All the youthful freshness is there, and yet it plays itself so much more easily. And nobody pays any attention.’

What to Listen For

I. Vivace. A brass fanfare, then the piano crashes in with a cascade of double octaves and chords, a gesture taken from the openings of the Grieg and Schumann concertos. The flourish returns later in the movement and helps to hold it together. The main theme that follows is short by Rachmaninoff’s later standards, but it already rises and falls in the long arch that became his signature.

II. Andante. A nocturne, and a brief one, only 74 bars long. The piano muses over quiet support from the orchestra, and the harmony is coloured here and there by the chromatic touches he added in the revision.

III. Allegro vivace. The finale begins loudly, with the bar lengths shifting back and forth, one of the few places where this conservative composer plays with metre; this opening dates from 1917. A long central episode in E-flat major, far from the home key, gives the soloist room to sing before the quick music returns and drives to the end.