>> David Plylar: Good evening everyone. My name is David Plylar. I'm with the concert office at the Library of Congress in the music division. And I'm really pleased to see such a great crowd for this pre-concert talk and for the concert coming up with Louis Lortie and Hélène Mercier. You're in for a real treat on all fronts tonight. I'm just going to introduce our speaker briefly and then let him get the show on the road here. Blair Johnson is associate professor of music theory at Indiana University where he teaches a variety of courses and advises doctoral dissertations. Blair has a background as a violinist, composer and a keyboardist. He studied music at the Cleveland Institute of Music, University of Michigan, the Meadowmount School of Music in New York and Tanglewood. Blair earned his PhD from the University of Michigan with a dissertation about Sergei Rachmaninoff's late music that received a ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award. His publications have appeared in scholarly journals, and he is presented at national and international conferences. His work deals mainly with aesthetics of classical music from the post-romantic era and with 20th century approaches to musical form and timbre. Current projects include a study of sound qualities and orchestral music and a book in progress about Rachmaninoff's aesthetics. So please welcome Blair Johnston. Thanks. [ Applause ] >> Blair Johnston: Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here tonight to enjoy the concert with you and to share some thoughts that I have about this fantastic music. The [inaudible] of the concert tonight, the program's culminating point, to use one of Rachmaninoff's own expressions, is Rachmaninoff's last work, Symphonic Dances, Opus 45. The Library has recently acquired the manuscript of the two-piano versions of Symphonic Dances, and this is cause for celebration. Now, all major source materials for the work are under the same roof for the first time since Rachmaninoff finished the piece in Centerpoint, New York in 1940. And of course, we also commemorate the 75th anniversary of Rachmaninoff's passing in 1943. Rachmaninoff's last work, every time I hear or play Symphonic Dances, I'm intensely aware of its last-ness. An artist's last work holds us in special thrall. These works often seem to have special meaning. It often feels like they are specially encoded for posterity. It's hard not to think of the last work as a kind of culminating testimony. And sometimes, last works really are deathbed works. Think of Beethoven lying ill as he penned the last movement of the Opus 135 String Quartet in 1826. Mus es sein, he scrolled in the score, must it be. He sets the words wordlessly to music in the slow opening. My mouse has died. Try that again. Well, we'll skip the music for a moment. As we learn with the fast theme of the movement, yes, it must be. It must be. Now, what exactly it is that must be, what the difficult decision of Beethoven's title actually is, your guess is, frankly, as good as mine. Epigraph and a bit of fatalistic biographical context are enough for such mythologized aesthetic experience. It works better if we keep things underdetermined. In hearing a work like Opus 135, we can hope for a glimpse of revelation. But we shouldn't imagine that we will really understand the revelation until we too have reached the culminating point. The deathbed work, then. It's hard to hear Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, completed just weeks before he died in 1975, without connecting the music's austere qualities, its bare textures, its elegiac contours and dark harmonies, dark even for Shostakovich, its self-quotation, without connecting these features to the composer's illness and self-awareness of death. And why shouldn't we make such connections? David Bowie's last music video shot in 2016 depicts him in a hospital bed stricken with cancer. The song is called Lazarus, and I think that says it all. But Rachmaninoff's last work is no deathbed work. He lived a good three years after finishing The Dances in 1940, happily for audiences who heard him perform in 1941, '42 and '43. And in a way, you could argue that Symphonic Dances isn't quite his last work anyway. The next year, he undertook yet another round of revisions on the Fourth Piano Concerto, that brilliant but under-loved work of 1926. The 1941 Concerto revisions are extensive enough that you could reasonably suggest the piece in its final envisioning is a work from 1941. Also from 1941 is a solo piano paraphrase of a work by Tchaikovsky. But really in the telling of the Rachmaninoff story, Symphonic Dances is the last work. And though not a deathbed work, it is a work filled with ghosts of a kind. In his review of the 1941 New York orchestral premiere, their critic Louis Biancolli wrote, "The piece teams with weird sounds, some of them just plain echoes. Mr. Rachmaninoff's orchestra is definitely haunted, especially the wind section, which is a wind of rendezvous of ghosts. The memories crowd in thick and fast." By ghosts and echoes and memories, Biancolli was referring to sonic features, things that sounded timbrely weird to him. Remember, he was listening to the orchestral version. To something about the expressive tone of the work and to music from the historical past, musical quotations and reminisces, clear references to Rachmaninoff's own earlier works abound in Symphonic Dances, as do allusions to late 19th century styles and topics, to some other Russian composers and to certain liturgical and folk idioms. Rachmaninoff suspected that Symphonic Dances might be his final work. He called it his last flicker. So there's something evocative about Biancolli's words. Others have echoed him without knowing it. The cloud of ghost-related words surrounds Rachmaninoff's late works, and Symphonic Dances, in particular. Towards the end of his life, Rachmaninoff described himself as a ghost wandering in a world grown alien. Olin Downes commented on the fantastical apparitions in the third movement of Symphonic Dances and described the waltz in the second movement as sensuous melodies, sometimes bittersweet, sometimes to a Viennese lilt, and Vienna is gone. Suggesting that Rachmaninoff's dance summons a dead era, a dead genre back to life for a short while. For Malcolm McDonald, the second movement is rather ghostly, while the first movement ends with an exorcism. The music itself seems ready to play the part. In the first movement, Rachmaninoff quotes his own First Symphony, a work withdrawn in the 1890s, and as far as the public knew when Symphonic Dances was premiered in 1941, dead in a way. In the third movement, Rachmaninoff transplants a passage from his poem Isle of the Dead, and with it, the Dies irae. And Symphonic Dances ends with a transformation of music from the ninth movement in Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil, the Vespers, specifically the stanzas that glorify the Holy Ghost and speak to the resurrection of the dead. If you are looking for an example of Rachmaninoff's brilliantly vibrant alloy of Bohemianism, mysticism and orthodoxy, you could do no better than this, ghosts, indeed. I'm going to circle around these ghosts in a couple of different ways during my talk, trying to understand them from a couple different perspectives. The ghosts have an unusual home in Symphonic Dances. It's not entirely clear what genre we're really dealing with here. The version of the work heard most often is the one for orchestra, and that may be Rachmaninoff's best orchestration. It is certainly his most colorful, recalling, like the Third Symphony before it, the scintillation of late romantic Russian orchestral works while featuring what are, for Rachmaninoff, unusual touches, tubular bells, gong strokes and orchestral piano part and the only music he ever wrote for saxophone. Yet, and this is central to our gathering here tonight, Symphonic Dances is the only big orchestral work by Rachmaninoff that also exists in a version for two pianos that he sanctioned for performance. Rachmaninoff performed the piano version with Horowitz privately in Beverly Hills in 1942, if only they had recorded it. And this photograph is actually on display here in the Library. How are we to hear a work like this or to play it? When you know the orchestral Symphonic Dances, can you ever really forget its colors while hearing the two-piano version? Should pianists playing Symphonic Dances try to summon the sounds of bells, gongs and saxophone? Should an orchestra in some way channel it's pianistic touch? I find it beautiful that this question should be so central in Rachmaninoff's last work. For while we think of him today as a composer pianist, when he launched from the Moscow Conservatory in the 1890s, he thought of himself more as a composer conductor. And it was as an orchestral conductor that he made his performing career at first. It was really only after he immigrated to the West in late 1917 that he became publicly the titan of the piano we now remember and largely for financial reasons, not entirely out of choice. And what did Rachmaninoff mean when he called the three dances symphonic? The word can mean simply orchestral, or it can indicate that a work draws upon the genre of the symphony. Or it can suggest that a work aspires to the integrated organicist aesthetic that we associate with the post-Beethovenian symphony in general. How do these three dances relate to one another? Are we to hear Symphonic Dances as three somewhat connected pieces or as a genuinely integrated multimovement cycle, or both? The three dances are in three different keys, unlike most symphonies. But like a symphony, they seem to hang together tightly. Further complicating the question of genre, there may be vague programmatic images embedded in the work. When Rachmaninoff was sketching Symphonic Dances, he assigned each of the three dances a time of day, though he never included these in any version of the score. The first dance is noon. The second dance, a waltz, is appropriately set in the evening. And the third dance happens at midnight. And Symphonic Dances wasn't the first title Rachmaninoff considered for the work. The working title was Fantastic Dances, which has quite different associations. Many golden age and silver age Russian musical works are famous for their fantastical treatment of traditional or fairy tale subjects from Glinka's Ruslan and Lyudmila in the 1840s through early 20th century works, like Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel, Stravinsky's Symphonie Fantastique and Firebird. I don't pick those titles random. When Rachmaninoff left Russia in late 1917, he took with him only a single score by another composer, Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel. And he is known to have wept while listening to The Firebird. Rachmaninoff's last two orchestral works, the Third Symphony and Symphonic Dances, conjure a more self-consciously Russian sound world than works from his middle period, works like the second piano concerto or the Second Symphony, in which Russian idioms are dressed in a more outwardly cosmopolitan guard. It's not surprising that so many years in exile should summon these ghosts in 1940. Close your eyes tonight as you listen and imagine the world in which Rachmaninoff composed a work like the Russian Rhapsody of 1891, a work some 50 years in the past when Symphonic Dances was composed. Not at all coincidentally, on tonight's program there's another two-piano work composed in 1940 by an exiled Russian composer pianist, Medtner's Russian Round Dance, a tale which similarly conjures the lost world. And the first work on tonight's program is Rachmaninoff's early fantasy pictures, Opus 5, a summoning of ghosts from fantastical late Tsarist Russia then bookends tonight's concert chronologically, programmatically and topically. So, though not a deathbed works, Symphonic Dances is a work that dances with ghosts in a way. And in a few minutes, I'll talk about some of those ghosts in detail. But we shouldn't imagine that these ghosts are tantamount to a kind of deathbed testimony. We tell other kinds of stories about last works too. We inscribe a whole range of meanings as we experience last works. Interpretative themes that cut across the stories we like to tell about them, themes that help us find special meaning in last works. These themes create a backdrop against which we hear works like Symphonic Dances, even if we're not always aware of them. And several different lats work themes are specifically suggested by the ghosts in Symphonic Dances. I've already identified one last work theme, though it doesn't apply here. Deathbed testimony. Closely related to this is the theme of the unfinished magnum opus, the artist climbs some magnificent superhuman summit, so the story goes, but mortality intervenes. In the lore of the orchestral repertoire, Mahler was felled by his attempt to write a 10th Symphony. Just as Bruckner had been felled during the composition of his own 9th. One shall not surpass Beethoven, the saying goes. Arnold Schoenberg put it this way. "It seems that the 9th is a limit. He who wants to go beyond it must pass away. It seems as if something might be imparted to us in the 10th, which we ought not yet to know. For we are not ready. Those who have written a 9th stood too near the hereafter. Perhaps the riddles of this world would be solved if one of those who knew them were to write a 10th." Typical Schoenbergian transcendental mysticism followed by typical Schoenbergian plain speak. And that is probably not going to happen. But if late romantic fatalism isn't to our taste, we might consider something like Bach's unfinished Art of the Fugue, a work in which he focused his powers of counterpoint for one last magnificent essay and in which he signed his name as a musical cypher, BACH, the notes B flat, A, C and B natural, for the first and only time, as though to sign off on life's work, and the last Fugue is incomplete. Then there's the theme of the devotional term in the last work. This is a big one, and it will be important for Symphonic Dances. Lots of German composers turned to Lutheran chorales when the end came around probably, as the music writer Jan Swafford quipped a few years ago, to earn a bit of grace after lives lived hardly piously at all. Braham's last work is a set of organ chorale preludes. Robert Schumann's Last Sketch is a chorale setting written in hardly the best of conditions. Alban Berg's last finished composition is the violin concerto with its extensive use of the chorale es ist ganuge [phonetic], it is enough. In its own way, Wagner's Parsifal fits the theme. He finished it in 1882, a year before his death and already seriously ill. The opera is a kind of grail quest and a damned troubling one at that, an arguably racist antisemitic grail quest. Schoenberg's last works are a setting of Psalm 130 and an unfinished follow up modern song. But the Germans were hardly alone in taking the devotional turn at the end. After finishing his last opera Falstaff, Verdi composed only liturgical works. And Rossini wrote his Solemn Mass, or as he called it his Little Solemn Mass, quote, the last of my sins of old age. He wrote this decades after retiring as a professional composer in order to focus on his activities as a virtuoso gourmand. Igor Stravinsky's last work is Requiem Canticles of 1966, last, unless you count an adorable little setting of The Owl and the Pussycat that same year. Stravinsky's Requiem Canticles is also an example of the next last work theme, the requiem for the self. But the most famous musical requiem for the self is without a doubt Mozart's unfinished one. This theme, too, in a way will figure in Symphonic Dances. Then there's turning inward, a theme about introspective last works that feel like they approach revolution, as though turning inward for a view of eternity, something timeless and incorporeal. This is a story we tell often about the last Beethoven quartets. Think of a movement like the Heiliger Dankgesang, the holy song of thanks from Opus 132. Let me see if I can get the audio working here. Bear with me one moment. Having a little trouble. Let's see if it goes. [ Music ] I'll tell a bit of this story in Symphonic Dances. Sometimes we see or hear qualities in last works that seem to transcend the artist's only epoch as though all concern about the contemporary world has evaporated in the intense light of pure aesthetic vision. Michelangelo worked on the Rondanini Pieta for years before his death in 1564, and he worked on it intensely just before he died. Authors often describe it as a striking departure from his earlier style, a work that seems to go back in time into the gothic yet also to leap forward far into the artistic future with astringent lines that are, as Enrica Crispino put it, incredibly close to the modern taste. A musical example of this theme might be Beethoven's Grosse Fuge of 1825. Stravinsky famously described this work as quote, an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever. But there's always that even more famous 1826 review in the [inaudible] which described the great Fuge uncharitably as a confusion of babble and likened it to Chinese, which is to say, utterly incomprehensible to a Deutscher of the early 19th century. Then there's a theme we might call calm acceptance. Think of Schubert's last piano sonata, the big B flat major one with its warm expanses that unfold with almost inhuman steadiness. Or in a different way, think of Schubert's late song cycle Winterreise. By 1827, Schubert's health was shattered. He had known for years that he was dying, and though miserable, had to some degree come to grips with this grim reality. At the dreary end of Winterreise, when the freezing hurdy-gurdy man comes onto the scene, there is no urgency, no panic, just a sigh of bleak resignation at the inevitable. Or there's that incredibly warm last chord of Im Abendrot, the fourth of Richard Strauss' Four Last Songs, a song about the evening glow literally and metaphorically. And again, bear with me just a moment as I get the audio. [ Music ] The next theme that runs through stories we tell about last works is related, I think, to this one. The final simplicity, Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony, his last finished work, was originally written as a radio piece for children and maintains that kind of tone throughout. Or over in England, there's Britten's Third String Quartet. Though not quite his last work, Brian Hogwood has remarked the Third Quartet quote, is where Britten officially takes his leave. This is the moment where he gives up his soul. Peter Evans describes its lucidity, the simplicity of its language, the serenity to which it aspires represented distillation, not a dilution, of Britten's expressivity. Then there is the theme of fading light. Haydn's last work is the unfinished Quartet Opus 103. He was simply too tired to keep working on it at the end and put it to the side, going out not with a bang or a whimper but with a kind of noble exhaustion after a long life of hard work. The Quartet is unfinished, and Pache [phonetic] Bill Drabkin who created a performing version a few years ago, it's okay that the piece is unfinished. It's better, somehow more meaningful that it's unfinished. I suppose we should also recognize in passing a more extreme, and for some of us, less appealing last work theme, the preposterous overcompensation. Alexander Scriabin was Rachmaninoff's classmate in the late 1880s and early 1890s. His unfinished and unfinishable Mysterium project was an elaborate synesthetic neo devotional scripture meant to re-clothe the world in a theosophist garb. Or there's always Charles Ives' unfinished and unfinishable Universe Symphony. But finally, I think the most important last work theme, summary or return to beginnings, a last work filled with especially meaningful quotations or allusions, or in which there is a turning back to some foundational genre or artistic issue, some generative crux from the beginning of the career, ghosts from the composer's past, ghost friendly or foul, take their places in a panorama of self-reflection. Think again of the references in Shostakovich's Viola Sonata, or of Shostakovich's quotation filled Eighth Quartet, which if his friends are to be believed was composed while he was in a suicidal state in 1960 after joining the party and which is, if not an actual last work, an honorary last work of sorts. Or Strauss' Metamorphosen, also not quite a last work but a work haunted by music from Strauss' own earlier operas. And of course, by the Funeral March from Beethoven's Eroica Symphony. Several of the ghosts in Symphonic Dances will clearly suggest this theme. Now the truth is that many last works are only last works, not the culminating gestures we imagine them to be, the products of happenstance as likely as not followed by months or even years of continued living. By more sketches or by small lesser-known works that for some reason or another don't get counted in the reckoning. A liner note will tell you that Sibelius with his 7th Symphony and his tone poem Tapiola, made his final statements about the symphony and the symphonic poem. But of course, Sibelius lived another 30 years after finishing those famous last works, composed a handful of more pieces, and we are now certain finished an 8th Symphony that he then destroyed. The American novelist Joseph Heller came up with a brilliant title for his self-consciously late novel Closing time, which is a sequel to Catch-22. Both Catch-22 and Closing Time are filled with concerns about the end. In the early novel, World War II is the specter. In the later novel, nature is the specter. Closing Time, what a great title for a last work. But Heller kept on living and six years later had to write a second last novel, Portrait of an Artist as an Old Man. That one did the trick and was published posthumously. Or back to Michelangelo's final Rondanini Pieta. Whatever it is we decide to see chiseled in this striking form realistically speaking, the work is unfinished because Michelangelo botched it. In his last days, he hacked away at the marble too much, making the sculpture impossible to complete. Definition was lost. The figures were elongated to the point that they no longer acquit themselves in proper renascence fashion. It's hard not to think that had Michelangelo lived another year he might have tossed the Pieta out. But this is not to dismiss the sculpture. It may be the product of a mistake, but it is no failure as long as it impresses and expresses. Whatever stories we tell, it's probably true that aesthetic experiences coalesce as much around chance happenings as around anything else. But Rachmaninoff's last work really is a last work, in tone, in material, and I think in the kinds of meanings it asks us to hear in it. So which specific last work themes swirl around in our hearing of Symphonic Dances. It's not a deathbed work. We know that. It's not an unfinished magnum opus. Symphonic Dances is most certainly a finished composition in two forms. It's not at all simple sounding, nor with its rhythmic vitality does it suggest fading light. There is no unhinged overcompensation here, nor I think would many people hear it as bursting forth into a radical epoch transcending new style. But Symphonic Dances does involve very much return to beginnings and summary, at least one moment of profound calm acceptance, hints of the requiem, the devotional term, and sometimes a sense of turning inward. I've gradually become aware over the years just how important these themes are to me and my hearing of Symphonic Dances. So let me sketch them briefly for you now and offer for them to you for your hearing this evening. The return to beginnings, the summary. The return to beginnings theme works, of course, because as they say, you can never go back. In a 1941 interview, Rachmaninoff listed Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov as his strongest musical influences. At the core of his quintessentially post-romantic style is an inseparable fusion of the deeply melodic Moscow idiom and the flamboyantly colorful St. Petersburg idiom. But later in life, other influences were, of course, added, from jagged modernist edges to fascinating jazz-age hues. When Rachmaninoff summons the bygone era in Symphonic Dances, the result never sounds like music from that era. That's what makes retrospective so powerful. There are several ghosts in Symphonic Dances that come together to quite specifically suggest the return to beginnings theme and also to make it a summary of sorts. One appears at the end of the first dance, the quotation of a theme from Rachmaninoff's First Symphony, who's disastrous premiere in 1897 left decades long scars on the composer. Equally prominent is the quotation of material from Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil at the end of the third dance. The vigil is a piece from 1915, but it is a work in which Rachmaninoff channeled a powerful influence from his earlier musical days, orthodox singing. Then there's a package of other allusions to other works, some of them plain, some of them hazier. Ghosts from Isle of the Dead in the third dance, strains from the Fourth Concerto in the third dance, a sinewy line from the Third Symphony in the middle of the first dance. A bit of the opera Aleko in the middle of the third dance, the Dies irae and other references. Max Harrison has plausibly commented on several more or less secret self-quotations and allusions in the work and identified his handful of them, including the bells, the second suite for two pianos, the First Symphony, the Second Symphony and et tu tableau, Rimsky-Korsakov's Golden Cockerel and Prokofiev. Others have made similar lists, a quality of retrospective is baked into this composition. The next four ghosts are examples of what musicologists call topics, patches of music that call to mind associations with other styles or types of music, things that have special meaning. The noisy climaxes that you will hear in all three dances are scored with the tingly, jingly percussive tumult characteristic of late 19th century works, works by the mighty handful of 19th century Russian music. A rattling highly syncopated dance at the end of the whole work that calls to mind walloping good Roma song and dance, or perhaps something along the lines of the Vesnianka song-dance genres that also influenced Stravinsky in his early days. Bell sounds are never far off in Rachmaninoff's works. In the orchestral version of Symphonic Dances, he uses actual bells, a glockenspiel and gone. But even in the two-piano version, as in so many other piano works, Rachmaninoff finds ways to emulate the multilayered harmonically complex sounds of Eastern European bell ringing. Nineteenth century European high society dances appear, especially the evening waltz in the second of Symphonic Dances. We have to remember that this was composed in New York in 1940. In that context, a waltz is a marked thing, full of signification. Let me put one of these reminiscences on center stage now, a quotation from the First Symphony at the end of the first dance. As I do this, other allusions will enter one by one as a supporting cast, and they will bring other last work themes with them. The first dance as a whole is in a three-part from, ABA, fast, slow, fast, with a lyric song in the middle. The quotation from the first symphony happens near the end at the coda. Its arrival is marked in a striking way. The music just before the quotation is scored as bells across several different registers low to high. There are Sforzando chords rumbling low tremolo, bare tritones that dissipate into the ether, a trill, and in the orchestral version, three peals from the gong. Gongs were sonic heralds in times past, so is this one. The arrival of the first symphony quotation is announced, and in an harmonically striking way too, with a sudden turn to what we call the whole tone scale. Whole tone music has a way of wiping the slate clean. It can be a kind of musical reset button with hallucinatory quasi triads and hazy unnaturally stretched melodic figures. The whole tone scale instantly conjures images from fantastic late 19th century Russian music, the very context in which Rachmaninoff composed his first symphony. Here's the setup for the quotation. [ Music ] The real world of 1940 is suspended for a moment just before the First Symphony arrives upon the scene. For me, this is the moment in the dance, and I strongly suspect it's the moment that Rachmaninoff would have called the culminating point, to use his term again. The bell strokes dissipate tension as though to dissipate also the decades-long pain of the First Symphony, or as McDonald put it, to exorcise a bitter memory. The presentation of First Symphony material is transformed to suit. In the First Symphony, the opening statement of a theme is triple forte, rhythmically accented and in the grim fatalistic key of D minor. [ Music ] But here, in 1940, the theme is piano legato and in the transparent key of C major with dancing glockenspiel sounds that accentuate the transformation. [ Music ] We have to remember that when Rachmaninoff composed this passage in 1940, he had been away from Russia for a long time and that Western European and American audiences had never heard his abandoned First Symphony. The quotation represents a profoundly private gesture, a culminating point, not just in music, but in life and I think perhaps a moment of calm acceptance. There are two references that give Symphonic Dances a hint of the requiem theme and two or three elements that suggest the devotional turn at the end. One requiem element is the transplanting of a passage from Rachmaninoff's tone poem Isle of the Dead into the middle of the third dance. The other is the Dies irae. You can't open a biography about Rachmaninoff without reading something about the Dies irae, the 13th century Latin hymn that sets the day of judgment. During the 19th century, the Dies irae melody, or really just its first notes, had become a kind of death theme in countless concert works and requiem. [Singing] Dies irae, Dies irae. [Speaking] And the shadow of the Dies irae haunts a lot of Rachmaninoff works. If you go to Wikipedia, face it, we all use it, you'll find a list of works that use the Dies irae. And in that list, Rachmaninoff has the most citations. Although he'd been alluding to this theme since the 1890s, remember the First Symphony theme, it turns out that Rachmaninoff actually didn't know the real Dies irae chant until the 1930s, when he wrote to Joseph Yasser to ask about it. After that, he inserted in prominently in the rhapsody of 1934 in a Third Symphony from a couple of years later and, of course, in Symphonic Dances. In Symphonic Dances, the Dies irae is summoned vaguely by several melodic turns in the first dance, but it is most at home in the third dance, which like the first dance, has a three-part form, ABA, fast, slow, fast. The Dies irae is suggested in chromatic twists at the beginning of the third dance but then arises very clearly in the slow middle section when the passage from Isle of the Dead appears more or less intact. Let me play the passage from Isle of the Dead and then the passage in Symphonic Dances. [ Music ] And here is the orchestral version of Symphonic Dances, the same performers. This is from the third dance. [ Music ] The Dies irae then haunts the third dance until it is finally banished or exorcised, to borrow Malcolm McDonald's word, in the aftermath of a particularly jangly [inaudible] climax. Here, as the Dies irae is heard for the very last time in all of Rachmaninoff's works, the music really takes the devotional term, and the Dies irae is absorbed into a wordless instrumentally sublimated orthodox hymn. A quotation of the resurrectional ninth movement from Rachmaninoff's All-Night Vigil. Blessed art thou, oh Lord, specifically the stanzas that speak to the Holy Ghost and to the resurrection of the dead. But this is no straightforward quotation. The liturgical All-Night Vigil music is transformed when it is put into the fast percussive Third Symphonic dance. Essential material and basic structure are preserved, but the music is rhythmically changed to suit the new kinetic context. Here is the choral version. [ Music ] And here's a bit of the quoted version. No, no, no. [ Music ] What was acapella treatment of chant in 1915 becomes a wild scene in 1940, something like a Ruska Roma song dance episode or perhaps something along the lines of the Vesnianka ritualistic song dance types that influenced the young Stravinsky. We don't often think of these associations with Rachmaninoff, but maybe we should. Alexander Goedicke recalled the breath of Rachmaninoff's liturgical and folk music interests. Rachmaninoff loved church singing very much and quite often, even in winter, would get up at 7:00 in the morning and hail a cab in the darkness, mostly to drive to the Taganka, to the Andronyev monastery where he stood in the half darkness listening to the austere ancient chants. It commonly happened that on the same evening he would go to a symphony concert and then, more often than not, go on to have supper at the restaurant Yar or the Strelna, where he would stay late into the night listening with great enthusiasm to the singing of the gypsies. In the early morning chant, at night gypsies, or Roma, as we should call them, remember that in the drafting stage Rachmaninoff thought of the first dance as noon, the second as evening, the third as midnight. Midnight, when the days meet. When at the end of Symphonic Dances, the end of Rachmaninoff, the pious All-Night Vigil music is used together with intensely rhythmic late-night singing and dancing to make a fantastic culminating vignette. A small package of orthographic elements puts a context around this devotional term for us to hear tonight. Though the vigil hymn is voiceless in Symphonic Dances, it is not quite wordless. In the orchestral score, at measure 361, in the third dance, Rachmaninoff wrote the word hallelujah at the moment where in the original version of the All-Night Vigil music, the choir sings the text restored to life those who have fallen from it, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah. This telling inscription survives in the published score, and Rachmaninoff wrote, I thank thee, oh Lord, at the very end of the score. The last theme I'll offer before we break to get settled in for the concert is the idea of turning inward. In an interview back in 2001, Vladimir Ashkenazy, one of the few people who's performed and recorded everything Rachmaninoff wrote as a pianist and conductor, made a remark about Rachmaninoff's last works that has stuck with me ever sense. Quote, Rachmaninoff's last pieces have a different hue. The harmonic language no longer sounds outgoing to me. To me, the harmonies sound as if they were closing in on themselves in the combination of harmonies. In the type of harmonies, there is a dark hue, which is incredibly attractive to me and I hope to others too in such works as the Corelli Variations, the Paganini Rhapsody or the Third Symphony. There's an incredibly dark hue here, harmonies that Tchaikovsky would never have dreamed of, fantastic harmonies. Music writer Leonid Sabaneyeff said something similar when he described Rachmaninoff's lyric melodies. There is no impulse toward action in them, torpid half slumbering visionary. One would think of vision full of fascination and passion is sweeping before one's gaze. Once more overwhelming with a torrent of darkness and then vanishing into the funereal clouds of eternity, as if in a torpid hashish state, the composer will-less, motionless imagines visions full of fascination and beauty and does not even wish to reach out for them. Visionary gaze, clouds of eternity motionless, there are several passages in Symphonic Dances that I can't help but hear along these lines, and I'll play a bit of two for you. The first is the slow lyric middle of the first dance where in the orchestral version, we hear the saxophone. [ Music ] It is, as Ashkenazy suggested, dark hued, modal, distant and even archaic sounding at times. The other passage is the slow lyric middle of the third dance. It is intensely chromatic but similar to the first passage I played in suggesting an almost motionless visionary state turned inward, witnessed to some fascinating beauty that suspends reality for a while. [ Music ] A thought by way of conclusion then. Here's a delightful photograph in the early 1890s. It shows Rachmaninoff at the country estate, rake in hand, cousins around, dower looking father Nikolay at the rear looking on. The photograph was, of course, intentionally stylized even for its time. But still, to our 21st century eyes, Rachmaninoff appears very old-fashioned, a hay bale, horse and buggy figure. Fifty years later, living in America, he loved motorboats, fast cars and jazz, a cosmopolitan globetrotting figure. The historical telescoping recalls a stylistic collision described by my office neighbor the musicologist Peter Burkholder. Quote, all the composers of Rachmaninoff's generation has aspects of both eras, combining 19th century elements with 20th century sensibilities. Rachmaninoff would probably not care for the light I've been shining on Symphonic Dances here tonight. He was famously taciturn when it came to music and had little patience for academicians after his entirely unsatisfying stint as a music theory teacher in the 1890s. Certainly, some and maybe even most of the ghosts in Symphonic Dances were meant to be sub rosa, and some of them are probably my ghosts, which I've projected on to the piece. And yet, I've always been deeply affected by the profound feeling of last-ness that courses through this work. And with last-ness, there is so often an equally profound sense of coming back around. If we listen carefully tonight, I think we might hear ghosts of the old world echoing in sounds from the new century. Thank you. [ Applause ] Thank you. [ Applause ] >> David Plylar: Questions? >> Blair Johnston: I'd be very happy to discuss, perhaps take some questions. >> David Plylar: We have two microphones. >> Blair Johnston: There's a microphone back there. >> You mentioned that Rachmaninoff approved of the two-piano thing. Who actually did it? >> Blair Johnston: Rachmaninoff himself did it. And in fact, he composed them simultaneously. He worked on them more or less side-by-side. So he was at work on the two-piano version before the orchestral version was finished. Yeah. Great question. Thank you. >> How about two other things that might be in there as well. >> Blair Johnston: Please. >> Revenge. >> Blair Johnston: Yes. >> And resurrection. >> Blair Johnston: So, I think that's a wonderful comment. The resurrection, I think, we can, let me see if I can get my thing working. It's not playing along well. Yeah, so the very text of the ninth movement from the vigil that's the music that's quoted here is the resurrectional text. So I think absolutely. And to turn the Isle of the Dead idea, being, of course, rode out with that [inaudible], right, the resurrectional movement trumps the Isle of the Dead music at the end. I think that's wonderful. Revenge is an interesting idea. I'll have to think more about that. I'd love to know what passages you have in mind for that. Yeah, thank you. It's a lovely idea. Thank you so much. Let's enjoy the concert. [ Applause ]