simonlife

Sergei Rachmaninoff died some three days before his 70th birthday in March of 1943. He was, as I would say, the last of the quintessential Romantics. I have no first-hand knowledge of the circumstances that followed his death, but I would wager that at least some of the world saw it as the end of an era. Eugene Ormandy, the famed director of The Philadelphia Orchestra for some 44 years, would lead the way to a rediscovery and reevaluation of the Russian’s earlier works, but in all other senses, Rachmaninoff took 19th century Romanticism to the grave. At the time of his death, he was one of the last notable composers who ever intimately knew the man named Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

I’m very much fixated on this notion of Rachmaninoff as the “Last Romantic”, and yet this epithet was originally coined for another man who lived for more than forty years after Rachmaninoff’s death: Vladimir Horowitz. The pianist was a close friend of the composer and recorded the third piano concerto as many as six times over the span of half a century. One of his last public performances of the piece transpired in September of 1978, at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City, under the baton of Zubin Mehta. It was documented on video.

I recently purchased the DVD recording of this performance (strangely released in Japan only and never in the States) on eBay. In this video, you get to see a man of more than seventy years play a piece infamously feared among pianists for its technical challenges and demands. And yet, for me, none of that even mattered, for this was a man who knew Sergei Rachmaninoff. This was a man who spoke with him, who laughed with him, and who played beautifully for him. Even Vladimir Ashkenazy, who has recorded the third concerto numerous times as both a soloist and conductor, was only six years old when the composer finally fell to illness.

This video documents a performance by one of the last musicians with direct ties to the late Romantic tradition. I am not a spiritual man of course, but if there were ever such a thread in my soul, I would like to believe that an ephemeral presence of the composer descended upon Avery Fisher Hall that night. Not to guide the fingers of the pianist or the baton of the conductor, but simply to observe, listen, and perhaps smile, as he so rarely did, before taking his final leave from this world.