London Philharmonic Orchestra

Rachmaninoff: Inside Out
Rachmaninoff and his contemporaries

Szymanowski Concert Overture*
Scriabin Piano Concerto
Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 1

Vladimir Jurowski conductor
Igor Levit piano
London Philharmonic Orchestra

* Supported by the Polish Cultural Institute in London.

Among the crowd of self-serving music critics who queued up to dismiss Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony in 1897, there was one opposing voice. Nikolay Findeisen wrote of the Symphony’s ‘beauty, novelty and inspiration’, recognising its huge emotional range and the highly alluring way in which Rachmaninoff captures a sense of impending tragedy right from the first page (perhaps inspired by his own desperate love for a married woman). It’s easy to see the influence Rachmaninoff had on his younger classmate at the Moscow Conservatory, Alexander Scriabin. When he wrote his Piano Concerto in 1896, Scriabin was deeply in love, too, and it shows in the music’s fluent elegance and supreme delicacy.

In co-operation with the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation.