Piano Concerto No. 1 in F‑Sharp Minor

Though by his own admission a notoriously lazy student, Rachmaninoff turned out some spectacular works while still in his teens: among them, his first opera, Aleko; the ever-popular Prelude in C-sharp minor ; and his First Piano Concerto, completed initially in 1891. An inveterate rewriter, Rachmaninoff heavily revised the piece in 1917, thinking out its textures and rethinking its form during the same year in which he would also flee from the revolution in Russia, first to Sweden and then to the U.S. and Switzerland, where he lived in voluntary exile. How would Western ears respond to this new version? Certainly, it retains all of the original's youthful freshness: just as in the Grieg and Schumann concertos, the piano has an early cascading statement before the orchestra gives us the Romantic sweep of the work's first and here distinctly Russian-sounding theme. There are shades of Grieg, too, in the yearning dreaminess of Rachmaninoff’s nocturnal second movement, and the soloist’s dexterity comes to the fore in the flashy displays of the fantastically light “Allegro scherzando” finale. Though Rachmaninoff was delighted with his revised version, audiences at his concerts in the U.S. were more interested in hearing his popular Second or Third concertos than the First—and this concerto is a great appetiser for the musical feasts to come.