Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No.4 (Lugansky, Wild, Kocsis)

Описание: Something striking happens when people talk about Rachmaninoff’s fourth piano concerto – that is to say, they don’t actually talk about the work. They talk about R.’s alienation from his homeland, his struggle to integrate modernity into his writing, the revisions he felt compelled to visit upon the concerto, his sense of bafflement and loss at his place in the wider musical world. The function of this chat is to imply that this work is essentially tragic, even broken; and as it’s accreted over time, it’s given rise to one very specific mode of defending this work, which is to make its supposed difficulty and darkness the point. After all, isn’t life full of pain? Isn’t what’s moving in this work the grim struggle for a new, less naïve idiom? Maybe the work is fragmented and unsatisfactory, but isn’t that precisely what appeals to our (waggles fingers) POST-MODERN SENSIBILITIES?

It’s all a lot of blather. This is a great work, and it’s great on its own terms, without reference to R.’s feelings, his exile, or whatever existential leanings we’re supposed to believe have ingratiated themselves to the modern ear. To my ear, this work is, and has always has been, fun. Like a child in a toy store it leaps from one dazzling texture to the next, bewitched by whatever spiky colour it sees out of the corner of its eye. Formally speaking there’s a strong tendency in this work to substitute development for repetition; so both outer movements are in sonata form with either very short and varied (Mvt 1) or entirely absent (Mvt 3) recaps, while Mvt 2 is an ABA with very brief return of the A material. As in Beethoven, codas serve not just to close but also have their own independent thematic (Mvt 2) and developmental/cyclic (Mvt 3) heft. It’s as if R. wrote something in ambitious sonata-allegro, lost all memory of sonata form, came back to the work, asked himself, “Why these repeats?”, and decided to keep just the good stuff.

As for darkness, there’s certainly some grim material in here. But also, so many of R.’s most exuberant and tender moments:

1. The 4 chords (Abmaj9, Fm11, Fb#11, Cm7) starting at 8:32 – huge pillars that drop out of Rautavaara or Messiaen (different formal language, but the effect of blinding emotion is the same). And the canon between high and low strings immediately after, when the recap’s melody runs up to and overtakes its augmented self.
2. The coda of the 2nd movement (15:14) – taken out of R.’s “Death and Transfiguration” etude-tableaux. Exotic chords placed so beautifully they don’t feel exotic, they’re just feeling, all the way down.
3. 18:39 – the horn melody decorated with quartally flavored piano. Ghibli-style heartstopper.
4. The crispy dissonances at 25:34 and the whirlwind woodwinds ten seconds later; a conference of birds.

If you put on your Ravel ears for this stuff, the work’s no longer canted or broken; it’s giddy and distractable and timbrally laser-precise. To be sure, there’s lots of Rachy things going on here. Long melodies decorated with arpeggio sprays; ostinato pedal points in codas; big melodies tying movements together. The motivic concentration first shown in the PC 3 is also present; an apparently passing falling minor 2nd in Mvt 3’s first theme comes to dominate the entire development (and a good chunk of the coda); a rising scale permeates much of Mvt 1’s texture. But the harmony is even more colourful than what we get in the PC 3; voice leading is almost always prioritised over conventional root movement (6:12). Rhythm is often unstable and shifting, so that you don’t hear the barlines where they are (especially in the last movement, with its nearly endless meter shifts, hemiolas, and hemiolas-within-hemiolas.)

Perhaps a little perversely, the first two performances here defy the conventional modernist reading of this work. Lugansky plays this like old-school Rach; big and romantic and vulnerable, and does so with such total conviction he pulls it off. Just listen to the fullness and breadth of the twin climaxes at 6:19 and 24:54. Wild is brash, joyous, exuberant; it’s not Gershwin by any means, but there’s definitely big band feeling in there (also, the warmth of the slip into G at 28:28). There are things he does just because they are fun (the sudden accents at 40:39), and they always work. Kocsis represents the (for lack of a better word) modern school: tense, lean, occasionally acerbic. Listen to how the sequential melodic fragment from 49:10 is phrased nervously, with accelerations through those 8th notes. It’s not my personal idea of the work, but it’s a very persuasive reading.

00:00 – Lugansky, Mvt 1
09:43 – Lugansky, Mvt 2
16:31 – Lugansky, Mvt 3

25:59 – Wild, Mvt 1
34:53 – Wild, Mvt 2
40:19 – Wild, Mvt 3

48:53 – Kocsis, Mvt 1
58:11 – Kocsis, Mvt 2
1:04:34 – Kocsis, Mvt 3