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While taking courses taught by his cousin, Alexander Siloti, Rachmaninoff added Taneyev’s
composition class and befriended Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). His graduation
composition, the opera Aleko, won Moscow Conservatory’s Great Gold Medal (only the
third time it had ever been awarded), and resulted in a publishing offer from Karl Gutheil.
Zverev, who was on the judging committee, even followed the nineteen-year-old composer
out of the examination room and gave him his own gold watch.

In 1886, Mitrofan Belyayev (1836-1904), a timber magnate and music lover, co-founded the
Saint Petersburg-based Russian Symphony Concerts with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (who
conducted them for the first ten years). The Russian Concerts were so successful that
Rimsky-Korsakov led performances of Russian works at the Trocadéro for the 1889 Paris
Exposition; Maurice Ravel was in the audience and dated his fascination with Russian
music to these performances. The acclaim garnered by Rimsky-Korsakov’s conducting of
Rachmaninoff’s The Rock in 1895 led Belayev to sponsor the premiere of Rachmaninoff’s
Symphony No. 1 in 1897.

Rachmaninoff would dedicate his Symphony No. 2 to Taneyev (1907), publish it with Gutheil
(1908), and it won Belyayev’s 1909 Glinka Prize after its St. Peterburg premiere. The original
length of the four-movement symphony was close to an hour, Rachmaninoff continued to
revise and shorten the work through the 1940s and 1950s; during his lifetime it was more
common to hear a highly abridged version of the complete work. The opening movement’s
dark introduction and stormy development.

[The version of this symphony the Plymouth Philharmonic performs is from orchestra
materials approved by the composer and performed by Eugene Ormandy and the
Philadelphia Orchestra. We are grateful to the Fleisher Collection at the Free Library of
Philadelphia for making these materials available to us. — sk]

Resources

Bertensson and Leyda’s Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music (NYU, 1956) is an
excellent annotated collection of the composers’ letters. The Rachmaninoff network
maintains current listings of events and resources related to the composer at www.
rachmaninoff.org.

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