Symphonic Dances, Op. 45

Program notes

About the Work

The Symphonic Dances are Rachmaninoff’s last completed work, a glorious valediction from the great Russian Romantic, written in 1940 when he was sixty-seven and living in exile in the United States. It is the only major piece he composed entirely in America, sketched on Long Island, at an estate in Centerport where he spent the summer, and dedicated to Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, who gave the premiere in January 1941. Though cast as a set of three ‘dances,’ it is in effect a late symphony: large in scale, symphonic in argument, and shot through with the autumnal melancholy, the long-breathed melody and the obsession with death and remembrance that mark Rachmaninoff’s final years.

The work is haunted by self-quotation and by the plainchant Dies irae (‘Day of Wrath’), the medieval chant of the dead that recurs across Rachmaninoff’s output like a signature. Most movingly, in the first movement he quotes (quietly, in the strings near the close) the main theme of his own First Symphony, the work whose catastrophic 1897 premiere had nearly destroyed him as a young man. Few listeners in 1940 could have recognised the reference, so this is a private act of memory, a man making peace with his own past. The finale stages a titanic struggle between the Dies irae (death) and a quotation from his own All-Night Vigil (resurrection); at the point where the Vigil theme finally triumphs, Rachmaninoff wrote the word ‘Alliluya’ in the score. It is a profound and personal farewell.

The orchestration is the most brilliant and original of his career, including a famous, unexpected alto saxophone solo in the first movement, a smoky, nostalgic voice unlike anything else in his music. The work crowns the all-orchestral programme with Rachmaninoff at his most masterly: richly Romantic, rhythmically incisive, and emotionally searching.

What to Listen For

The first dance (Non allegro) drives forward on a terse, march-like rhythm, but at its heart is one of Rachmaninoff’s most beautiful inspirations: a long, yearning melody given to a solo alto saxophone over gentle woodwinds; listen for that unmistakable, melancholy voice. Then, in the hushed coda, listen for the serene string melody that glows briefly before the end: that is the self-quotation from his First Symphony, his secret backward glance.

The second dance is a waltz, but an uneasy, shadowy one: an elegant, swaying triple-time dance repeatedly disturbed by ominous brass fanfares and a sense of menace beneath the glamour, like a ball haunted by ghosts. The finale is the dramatic core: listen for the grim, chant-like Dies irae motif stalking through the music, set against the surging, life-affirming theme drawn from his All-Night Vigil. The two ideas battle across the movement until the ‘resurrection’ theme breaks through in blazing triumph, driving to a tremendous, bell-clanging close, the final affirmation of a composer signing off his life’s work with thanks. Listen, too, throughout, for the dazzling orchestration: the biting rhythms, the glittering percussion, the rich strings and the inventive, surprising instrumental colours of Rachmaninoff’s last and in some ways most modern masterpiece.