Scherzo in D minor

Program notes

About the Work

This is where Sergei Rachmaninoff’s orchestral music begins. The Scherzo in D minor is his earliest surviving piece for orchestra, written while he was a pupil at the Moscow Conservatory. The manuscript is dated February 1888, when he was fourteen, though another hand later altered the year to 1887. He dedicated it to his cousin, the pianist Alexander Siloti, to whom he would also dedicate his First Piano Concerto.

The manuscript carries the heading ‘third movement’, so the scherzo was evidently meant as part of something larger, most likely a symphony, of which nothing else is known to survive. The Mariinsky Theatre’s note on the piece adds a human detail: on the title page the boy misspelt the word ‘scherzo’, though he had no trouble with the orchestration.

His model is easy to hear. The piece takes after the Scherzo from Mendelssohn’s music for ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the pattern for every light, quick, fairy-tale scherzo of the nineteenth century. The key is worth noting too. D minor seems to have meant something to the young Rachmaninoff, who went on to use it for the ‘Trio élégiaque’, Op. 9, and for his First Symphony.

Rachmaninoff never heard the piece played, as far as is known. The first performance was given in Moscow on 2 November 1945, two years after his death, and the score was printed soon afterwards. In this programme it opens an evening that Riccardo Chailly has built entirely from early Rachmaninoff, and it is the earliest thing in it by several years.

What to Listen For

The Scherzo lasts between four and five minutes and uses a small orchestra: woodwind in pairs, a single horn and trumpet, timpani and strings. Listen for the steady, pulsing rhythm that drives it, for the clear, uncluttered scoring, and for the fluttering flute writing that comes straight from Mendelssohn. There is very little here of the broad melody and dark colouring that people think of as Rachmaninoff. What it shows is a fourteen-year-old who already knew how an orchestra works, and that is the point of beginning the concert with it.