As my best friend and business partner, Albert Imperato, lectured passionately and convincingly on how to love Rachmaninov’s Sympony No. 2 (“don’t think about it, just do it!” he said equating the work to sunsets and chocolate cake, “do you question them?” he added), I remained unconvinced. We had just listened to a great performance of the symphony by the New York Philharmonic. I listened engaged, never bored by the music, the sound world is just too rich and curious, but it is oh so sweet and just kind of rolls off me.
Check out this YouTube clip of André Previn and the NHK Symphony Orchestra performing the first part of the third movement of the second symphony. I don’t feel bad that I don’t get it, because I know that if I am not getting my ecstatic experience from Rachy, I can get it elsewhere.
For me Rachmaninov (to paraphrase Bugs Bunny) made the wrong turn at Albuquerque after Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky had gone far enough in the direction of sweet indulgence. For me, we did not need to go further. So I have found myself taking the other turn with Schoenberg and Shostakovich.
Curiously, I am able to find a parallel with my personal experience with rock music history. Just as I felt rather sickened by the early 80s rock of groups like Foreigner and Toto (the Rachmaninovs of rock, if you will) I found my way in their diametric punkish counterparts, Black Flag, the Butthole Surfers and Dead Kennedys. Bands who felt and expressed angst darkly both with radical sound and the occasional touch of humor. This is how I found Shostakovich and my way into the angst-expressive side of the classical music tradition.
I realize that I am swimming against the tide here. Rachmaninov is music for the people, as is proven over and over again by the borrowing of his melodies by pop and soundtrack composers and was demonstrated again that night at the New York Philharmonic when the audience jumped to their feet with ecstatic applause. My ecstasy happens to lie in the grit. The clouds that threaten the sunset. The bitterness in that chocolate cake.
This is strictly a matter of taste as Rachmaninov was not expressing an easy life through his music. Quite the contrary, he was expressing what he felt was the antidote to hardship. Yet many of us seek a more homeopathic (“like cures like”) approach to our antidotes. And the chief procurer of alternative music at the time was Arnold Schoenberg.
Around the time Rachmaninov wrote his second symphony (1906-7), Schoenberg wrote his Chamber Symphony No. 1, which is a work that takes the left turn at Albuquerque. It emerges strongly from the world of romantic music, lush and large minded, but rhythmically and tonally it begins to stray and quest, to murmur and complain that we need change to face the challenges of a new era.
This brief segment of Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 played with ferocity by Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic might just get you on your feet and wanting more:
Schoenberg’s Chamber Symphony No. 1 turns the sound world of Mahler in upon itself almost jazzily playing off of Mahlerian seriousness. Yet it is not without its great climatic moments. The work has five movements, but is meant to be played without pause and near the end of fourth movement Schoenberg creates a beautifully balanced apotheosis, which tracing its way back through the humor and lightness of the works beginning opens the way to a triumphant finale.
Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2 is characterized by its sweeping and saccharine (to me) melodies and is thus a very different work than Schoenberg’s funky Chamber Symphony. But Schoenberg can ‘do lush’ as good as anyone and better than many, although his hues tend much more to dark red and indigo than light blue and pink. One of the greatest examples of lush Schoenberg is his famous tone poem Verklaerte Nacht (Transfigured Night), which happens to sit very high on my personal list of ecstatic masterpieces.
Verklaerte Nacht is an earlier work written when Schoenberg was even more under the influence of the Romantics, particularly Wagner. At the time he composed it, Schoenberg was caught in a romantic spell with Mathilde von Zemlinsky, whom he would later marry. Verklaerte Nacht conveys all the uncertainty and swelling thrill of new love. Yet even as it ends happily there are the strains of suffering that cloud and color that happiness.
In this YouTube clip from a Live From Lincoln Center telecast, Arnaud Sussmann, Erin Keefe, David Kim, Teng Li, David Finckel, and Priscilla Lee give us a nice sampling of the piece:
In the early 1920s, Dmitri Shostakovich began to compose some of the most exciting, radically charged symphonies of the 20th century. His symphonies will find many places in the Ecstatic Livingroom, but I will just sight his first symphony here as an antidote to Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2.
Shostakovich’s works are very lyrical, but he deploys force and atonal wallops like no other composer. It is perfect transitional music from hard rock to symphonic music, if you are so inclined. Shostakovich’s first symphony is a great introduction to his symphonic output. At around 30 minutes, it’s a relatively brief listen and offers many of the trademark Shostakovich elements. It begins innocently and easily enough with a few hummable tunes, but by the second movement those tunes have begun to morph into huge, explosive expressions of awe and fear. It is a journey through beautiful lyrical moments and unspeakable fear, which ends in a thrilling climax. Shostakovich was only 19 when he completed this symphony and it is relatively easy going, compared to what was to come. Even so, I cannot imagine what the first audience to have heard his Symphony No. 1, must have felt.
Here is a clip of Valery Gergiev, one of the world’s greatest interpreters of this repertoire, leading the London Symphony Orchestra in the finale:
This is music that gets me jumping up and down and often when I hear it live in concert halls, I look around and wonder how everyone can just sit there so apparently calm and not feel the need to get up and move! This was of course, one of the reasons we created the Ecstatic Living room. So we could just let go and do what we want to the music that we love.
This post was inspired by my personal inability to find the ecstatic experience in Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2, but it’s not meant to be a full-on put down of Rachmaninov. He wrote some great ecstatic works, including his final piece, the Symphonic Dances, which is absolutely rocking. But we’ll leave that for another time…..
And in case you’re interested, here are a few recommended recordings of these pieces:
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