Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40

Program notes

About the Work

The Fourth is probably the least known of Rachmaninoff’s piano concertos and the one that gave him the most trouble. He left Russia with his family at the end of 1917 and never returned. To support them he remade himself as a touring pianist, and for the best part of a decade he composed almost nothing. Only in 1926 did he feel able to take time away from the concert platform and finish a new concerto, parts of which he had been carrying in sketches for years.

He was uneasy about it from the start. The score was long, and he joked to his friend the composer Nikolai Medtner, to whom the concerto is dedicated, that it would have to be performed like Wagner’s Ring, over several evenings. Medtner replied that it was not length that made music boring, but boredom that made it seem long. Rachmaninoff cut it anyway.

He gave the first performance himself in Philadelphia on 18 March 1927, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski. His Three Russian Songs for chorus and orchestra were new on the same programme and were liked. The concerto was not. The reviews were the harshest he had received since the failure of his First Symphony thirty years earlier: critics found the piece shapeless and old-fashioned, and one called it “long-winded, tiresome, unimportant”.

Rachmaninoff cut the score again before publishing it in 1928, and when that version fared no better he put the work aside. He came back to it in 1941, revised the orchestration, simplified some of the piano writing, shortened all three movements and recast the finale. He introduced this third version in Philadelphia that autumn with Eugene Ormandy conducting, and the two of them recorded it. It was the last music he worked on, and it is the version usually played today. Opinions still differ about whether the revisions improved the piece or weakened it; the original 1926 score has since been published and recorded as well.

What disconcerted listeners in 1927 was partly that the concerto was not the Second or the Third over again. The textures are leaner, the themes shorter and more sharply cut, the harmony more astringent. Rachmaninoff had been living in New York, he enjoyed jazz and admired the Paul Whiteman orchestra, and commentators have long heard something of that in the harmonies, especially in the slow movement.

Yunchan Lim plays the concerto in his first appearances with the Berliner Philharmoniker. The orchestra’s announcement notes that he has already won over audiences with this work.

What to Listen For

Allegro vivace. There is no preamble: the movement launches straight into its energetic opening. Compared with the earlier concertos the ideas pass by quickly and are less plainly signposted, which is what early critics took for shapelessness.

Largo. The heart of the concerto, in C major. The piano begins alone, in a melancholy, inward mood, and goes on to rich, poignant chords, the harmonies in which listeners hear an echo of jazz. The strings provide a soft bed of sound for the piano’s sparse chords.

Allegro vivace. The finale breaks in with sudden force and gives the soloist an early flourish. This is the movement Rachmaninoff rewrote most thoroughly in 1941. It is restless and brilliant, the piano hardly pausing, and the tonality travels from G minor to a close in G major. The ending is brief.