Sergei Rachmaninov
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff (Semyonovo, Russia, 1873 – Beverly Hills, CA, 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He is best known for his works involving the piano, and for his degree of mastery as a brilliant pianist. He studied music with his mother from age 4; continued at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and then graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892, winning the Great Gold Medal for his new opera "Aleko." [1] At the Moscow Conservatory he took piano lessons from Nikolay Zverev and Alexander Siloti (his cousin).
Most particularly in the Piano Concerto no.2, the essentials of his art had been assembled: the command of the emotional gesture conceived as lyrical melody extended from small motifs, the concealrnent behind this of subtleties in orchestration and structure, the broad sweep of his lines and forms, the predominant melancholy and nostalgia, the loyalty to the finer Russian Romanticism inherited from Tchaikovsky and his teachers. [2]
Rachmaninoff married his cousin, Natalya Satina, in 1902.
Some works
- Piano Concerto No. 1 (1891)
- Morceaux de Fantaisie (1892)
- Morceaux de Salon (1894)
- Symphony No. 1 (1896)
- Piano Concerto No. 2 (1901)
- The Miserly Knight (1904)
- Francesca da Rimini (1905)
- Piano Sonata No. 1 (1908)
- Symphony No. 2 (1908)
- Isle of the Dead (1909)
- Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909) (First tour of America)
- Piano Sonata No. 2 (1913)
- Piano Concerto No. 4 (1926)
- Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934)
- Symphony No. 3 (1936)
- Symphonic Dances (1940) (Op. 45).
