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Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No.3 in D minor, Op.30; Symphonic Dances, Op.45
Substituting on short notice for Franz Welser-Möst, the Cleveland Orchestra’s indisposed music director, conductor Elim Chan revamped a program that would have contrasted Rachmaninoff’s rich Piano Concerto No.3 with Stravinsky’s wry Petrushka. Instead, she selected Rachmaninoff’s final major work, Symphonic Dances, to replace the Stravinsky ballet score, turning the concert into an examination of one composer’s darkening vision and a display of one conductor’s impressive grasp.
One hesitates to use the word ‘mastery’ for something done by a conductor not yet forty years old, but Chan’s sure hand left little choice. The Hong Kong-born conductor first came to wide attention ten years ago when she won the Donatella Flick conducting competition in London. Unlike other young colleagues who have embraced hype and threatened to burn out almost before their careers are underway, Chan has kept under the radar, honing her craft for the last decade in lower-profile positions. Her patience and diligence have paid off.
Conducting without a baton, Chan gave the kind of performance that is helping to elevate Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff to a level of respect he was never given during his lifetime. Seen as reactionary in the wake of the early-twentieth-century tsunamis of serialism and neo-classicism, Rachmaninoff’s popularity with audiences was dismissed as passé. After his death, the composer’s reputation slid even further. Rehabilitation began in the later decades of the twentieth century, but it is only in recent years that a general reevaluation has begun. The fashions for experimentalism and abstraction have crested and receded, yet Rachmaninoff’s music remains. Sloppy performances can give it a bad image, but Chan grasps that the key to Rachmaninoff is keeping an underlying tensile strength in place that never lets the composer’s lush asides sag into sentimentality. Emotion, yes, but never mere indulgent sentimentality.
His so-called Symphonic Dances are really an apocalyptic crypto-symphony that may tap into autobiographical material, though we are never given an explicit program. Indeed, Rachmaninoff probably didn’t think anyone would ever know that the closing pages of the first dance actually quote his suppressed First Symphony, a youthful work that suffered a disastrous premiere, after which the composer destroyed his manuscript score. It turns out, though, that the orchestral parts survived the composer’s purge, and the piece was reconstructed after Rachmaninoff’s death. The symphony told us two things: that Rachmaninoff was a great composer from early on in his career; and that even then his vision was dark.
Rachmaninoff subsequently worked hard to turn his vision brighter in his Symphony No.2 and Piano Concerto No.2, gaining a worldwide audience in the process. His Piano Concerto No.3 continued the process, starting in darkness and fighting its way to light, but composition had to take a back seat to concertizing after the Russian Revolution forced Rachmaninoff to flee his homeland and make a living as a pianist. The subsequent Fourth Piano Concerto and Third Symphony found the false cheer faltering, leading to critical drubbings. His composing career winding down, Rachmaninoff suddenly erupted with dark brilliance in his two final masterpieces, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (his disguised fifth piano concerto) and Symphonic Dances (his disguised fourth symphony). These pieces at long last delivered the snarling, dark triumph promised so long ago by his First Symphony.
I have little doubt that Elim Chan grasps this big picture of Rachmaninoff: she keeps a quiet but relentless thread of nervous energy driving the composer’s music which keeps it from ever feeling indulgent or slack. This by no means prevented her from exploring the byways of the quiet middle of the first dance or the almost constant hesitations of the haunted waltz second movement. Rather, she explored every nook of the work, efficiently demonstrating the fluctuations of tempo with her simple but shrewd gestures. Every move Chan made resulted in a discernable change in the orchestral response, and she encouraged a rich string sound and exultant brass and percussion, as well as stunning solos from the principal winds and saxophone. The crush of the concluding pages of the final dance was visceral, with the conductor wisely having the percussionist let the tam-tam ring out harshly after the final chord.
It is a further testimony to Chan’s leadership that she brought so much to the performance of the Piano Concerto No.3, dominated as it rightly and naturally was by pianist Yefim Bronfman’s ferocious concentration. Bronfman could happily explore the work’s depths knowing that Chan was keeping the performance tautly drawn around him, attentive to his every tweak of phrase. Despite all that intensity, Bronfman never turned to leaden aggression, keeping instead a supple sense of rhythm that worked in perfect tandem with Chan’s restless energy. The two turned in a compelling performance of an imposing work, perfectly placed in the context of Rachmaninoff’s lifetime of composition.
If that’s not mastery, I don’t know what is. And it introduces Chan to the ongoing speculations about a future successor to Welser-Möst, who long ago announced his intention to wrap up his tenure in Cleveland with the 2026/27 season. Instead of a moth-to-flame media star, perhaps it would be more the Cleveland style to select a dark horse candidate with quiet mastery.
Mark Sebastian Jordan
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