Ivan Bessonov — Rachmaninoff: Scherzo in D minor

Sergei Rachmaninoff wrote the Scherzo in D minor in February 1888, when he was only fourteen years old and studying at the Moscow Conservatory. It is his earliest surviving orchestral score and offers a fascinating glimpse of the future composer of the Piano Concertos, the Preludes, the Symphonic Dances and the Second Symphony at the very beginning of his creative life.

At the time, the young Rachmaninoff was living in Moscow in the household of the celebrated piano teacher Nikolai Zverev. His musical world was being shaped by the Moscow Conservatory and by musicians including Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev. Another important figure was his cousin Alexander Siloti, the distinguished pianist and pupil of Franz Liszt, to whom Rachmaninoff dedicated this youthful Scherzo.

The manuscript is dated February 1888 and bears the indication “Third movement”, suggesting that the Scherzo was conceived as part of a larger symphonic project that was never completed in that form. Its light, quick orchestral writing recalls Felix Mendelssohn’s famous Scherzo from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Another important presence is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: the young Rachmaninoff had closely studied Tchaikovsky’s Manfred Symphony and made a piano transcription of it, an experience that helped introduce him to the possibilities of orchestral writing.

Behind this brief and rarely heard work one can already glimpse the extraordinary musical world that Rachmaninoff would later develop — a meeting point between Russian Romanticism, the Moscow Conservatory tradition and the great European Romantic heritage.
#thebestclassicalmusic, #music, #classicalmusic, #Relaxingmusic