Early next year the Halifax Symphony Orchestra will be playing Rachmaninov's 2nd Symphony. We had the first rehearsal last night. When I was young I had Andre Previn's magisterial version of the piece, recorded with the LSO in the 70s, and in the years before I went to music college and became cynical, its passion and lyricism were often a mental soundtrack to my life.
To describe Rach 2 as sumptuous would be to short-change it. The symphony is nearly an hour's worth of musical velvet. I have conducted it before, an experience I remember chiefly for the long stretches of rehearsal spent cajoling the second violins to play fig. 33 correctly in the second movement; I remember too having to signal to one of the double basses who had turned up late for the concert how many beats I was going to give before the start of the last movement; that and the relief, as the music crested the last hill and began to wind itself up for the exuberant final bars, that we had got through it without disaster; Rach 2 is technically hard for the players, thickly scored and ambitious.
I also remember thinking - and this struck me last night too - "I no longer believe what Rachmaninov is telling me". It might be worth considering what exactly that is. Rachmaninov speaks of present unhappiness and of longing for something that is just out of reach, a longing expressed with almost fetishistic care and obsessive length. Only at the very end do we feel that we might have actually attained it, and it is that feeling of consummation and achievement which makes the final couple of pages so exhilarating.
How useful is that for living? In my experience not much. It may be difficult to get something you really want, and miserable when you haven't got it; but few things are as good (or bad) as they first appear, and an even bigger task is how to be happy once you have got something long desired. Rachmaninov isn't alone in focusing short-sightedly on this near term goal at the expense of what lies beyond it: many other Romantic composers strove to express loss, want and attainment. Why not? They are powerful feelings.
But for me this just makes the more emotionally mature achievements of other composers all the greater - I'm thinking particularly of Brahms, Nielsen and Sibelius. There is a quality of stoicism and resignation in Brahms' music which seems to recognise that the Romantic outlook is only a small part of human experience; as for Nielsen his two masterworks, the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, are explicit attempts to wrestle with how to live as an adult. They are not the most radical pieces of twentieth century music, but they see the world with a clarity and acuity far removed from Rachmaninov's sentimental vision. After writing the Violin Concerto, Sibelius went beyond the subjective play of human emotions into a rarefied musical sphere which reflects the relationship between man and the physical world.
Everyone should listen to Rach 2 once every year or so. It is a great piece of music, challenging and emotional, vividly orchestrated and full of memorable tunes. But it is not the whole story.
