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Peyser (2006), a document-based biography by Howard Pollack (2007), a correspondence-
based memoir by Richard Crawford (2019). Producers Martin Scorsese and Irwin Winkler
are currently in pre-production on a Gershwin-based musical-biopic film to be directed by
John Carney (with the working title Fascinating Rhythm).

[In separate correspondence with our program annotator, Laura Prichard, she shared with
me a detail about Gershwin I didn’t know. I feel this detail has special significance given
what is happening right now on the other side of the world. “I didn’t include anything about
it, but I could add a couple of sentences about Gershwin’s heritage as a person of Jewish-
Ukrainian extraction and how the beginning of his “Summertime” melody was inspired by
a Ukrainian lullaby… but the notes may be too long already.” Not at all, Laura. Now they
are perfect! – sk]

Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27 Sergei Rachmaninoff
(1873 — 1943)

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a late Romantic musician associated with Russia,
but many of his best-known compositions were composed outside that country. After
honeymooning in Austria and Germany, traveling widely as a virtuoso concert pianist,
and establishing himself as a conductor (even leading the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow for
two years), he suddenly resigned from his performing commitments in 1906. Tchaikovsky’s
publisher Jurgenson, from whom he had received his first commission (a piano-duet
transcription of Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty) helped him to escape with his wife and
infant daughter to Dresden, Germany: he thus avoided the political upheaval leading his
home country toward revolution. Many of his most beloved compositions were begun in
Germany during this time, including his Second Symphony, the tone poem Isle of the Dead,
and his First Piano Sonata. Over the next decade, he finished and orchestrated many works
during his annual summer trips to his in-laws’ estate near Ivanovka (350 miles northeast of
Kharkhiv, Ukraine); the aspen-ringed village was destroyed during the October Revolution/
Russian Civil War and then reconstructed in the 1970s commemorating “Rachmaninoff
sites in the Tambov region.”

Most of Rachmaninoff’s works are dedicated to, funded by, and published by early
colleagues and teachers. As a young man, he lived with fellow student Mikhail Pressman
at Nikolai Zverev’s and honed his skills as a pianist (practicing most days from 6-9am).
Zverev took him to concerts and invited him to entertain at his dinner parties for Anton and
Nicholas Rubinstein and the Tchaikovsky brothers (Peter and Modest). After his first year
in Moscow, Rachmaninoff was ready to begin Anton Arensky’s harmony classes at the
Moscow Conservatory, and transcribed Tchaikovsky’s Manfred symphony for piano, four
hands (1886, now lost). Zverev arranged for both thirteen-year-olds to play the work for
Tchaikovsky, and then included both in a fully memorized concert version of Beethoven’s
Symphony No. 5 (for piano, eight hands) presented to Sergei Taneyev (1856-1915), the
director of the Conservatory.

PAGE 14 Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra