Sonata No. 6 (Sonata of the Stars), Allegro, 1908 (tempera on paper) by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. M. K. Čiurlionis National Museum of Art, Lithuania. Čiurlionis was a composer and an early abstract artist whose work had a strong influence on Wassily Kandinsky.
A Recital by Conrad Tao, piano
with Benjamin Lanners, cello
By Harlow Robinson
Few “classical” composers have made a deeper imprint on American popular culture than Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943). His symphonies and piano concertos have inspired pop songs and graced soundtracks in a variety of films (Brief Encounter, Grand Hotel, The Seven Year Itch) and television shows (The Good Wife). Frank Sinatra’s recording of “Full Moon and Empty Arms,” a song adapted by Buddy Kaye and Ted Mossman from the surging third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto, made it to the seventeenth spot on the Billboard Charts in 1945, two years after Rachmaninoff’s death at his luxurious home in Beverly Hills.
Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Opus 43, is one of his most frequently performed (and recorded) compositions, and has enjoyed particular favor with film directors. A set of twenty-four variations on a theme from Niccolò Paganini’s violin solo piece Caprice No. 24, the Rhapsody was composed in Switzerland but received its premiere in Baltimore with the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1934. Variation 15, a vivacious scherzo, opens as a solo for the piano whose rapid sixteenth-note passages scamper up and down the keyboard until, as Rachmaninoff biographer Max Harrison writes, “it is stilled by the pianist’s plain F-major chord.”
Variation 18, on the other hand, creates a serene and meditative mood, lyrical rather than athletic. Here the Paganini theme appears in inverted form in mellow D-flat major, first in a sublimely lyrical twelve-bar passage for the soloist, then joined by the strings—music destined to become some of the most famous Rachmaninoff ever created. This variation shows up in the scores of numerous films, including Vincente Minnelli’s The Story of Three Loves (ballerina Moira Shearer drops dead while dancing to it), Dead Again, and even Groundhog Day.
No doubt Rachmaninoff’s image in the United States as a highly paid, extensively publicized, and artistically acclaimed piano virtuoso playing his own compositions helps to explain why his music hit a nerve with audiences of all kinds. His romantic and accessible music satisfied a nostalgic longing for a simpler and more pastoral era in the midst of intense urbanization, industrialization, and war. It provided solace and conveyed subtle emotional nuances of melancholy, regret, and faded passion. Although he lived well into the twentieth century, Rachmaninoff remained a nineteenth-century composer at heart.
After emigrating from Russia in 1917, Rachmaninoff lived in Europe through the 1920s and 1930s. In 1939 he moved to the United States, first to Long Island and then to Beverly Hills, where he joined a large community of European musicians, artists, and intellectuals seeking refuge under the palm trees from the rising dangers of fascism, communism, antisemitism, and violence in their home countries.
Rachmaninoff’s presence was well known in Hollywood, but he never wrote any music specifically for film. Walt Disney considered having Rachmaninoff play his Second Piano Concerto in his animated music feature Fantasia, but that idea never got beyond the planning stage. Film historians agree that the style of Rachmaninoff’s symphonic music was a major influence on Hollywood composers. One need only to listen to Max Steiner’s “Tara’s Theme” from Gone with the Wind to be convinced of that.
For Rachmaninoff, a brilliant keyboard virtuoso, the piano remained at the center of his creative life. Rachmaninoff said that his two sets of piano preludes (Opus 23 and Opus 32) “presented more problems than a symphony or a concerto.” Most of the ten preludes of Opus 23 (1901–03) grow out of small melodic or rhythmic fragments with a predominance of dotted note figures. Prelude no. 8 presents daunting technical challenges in the manner of the études of Chopin, to whom Rachmaninoff had paid tribute in his preceding work, Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Opus 22.
The thirteen Opus 32 preludes (1910) are considerably more adventurous in harmony, chromaticism, dissonance, and form. Dense and improvisational, these brief but evocative pieces seem to point the way to the even more experimental spirit of the Études-Tableaux, Opus 33, completed just one year later. In their ambiguity and open structure, the Opus 32 preludes resemble tone-poems evoking a particular visual, literary, or emotional image. Prelude no. 1 rushes forward in stormy chromatic triplet figures over a strongly accented bell-like bass line, venturing far from the home key of C major before finally settling down there quietly at the end. In Prelude no. 5 Rachmaninoff displays his lyrical side in a tender and sweet song set firmly in G major over delicate arpeggios.
Rachmaninoff wrote the first set of Études-Tableaux (Opus 33) in 1911 and the second set (Opus 39) in 1916–17. Usually translated as “study-pictures,” these pieces create musical evocations of external visual stimuli. At the outset of Opus 33, no. 3 (marked grave), somber and funereal C-minor chords yield slowly to the C major of the second part, where a sublime melodic line soars above arpeggios. More extroverted and theatrical than Opus 33, the Opus 39 set inhabits a dark world of anguish and struggle. Opus 39, no. 2, a kind of nocturne sketched with a light hand, is the simplest piece in the set, providing a calm in the storm. In a letter to composer Ottorino Respighi, who later orchestrated some of the pieces, Rachmaninoff explained that it “represents the Sea and Seagulls.”
Around the same time, in 1916, Rachmaninoff wrote the similarly lyrical and romantic Daisies on a text by Igor Severyanin in his last set of songs (Opus 38, no. 3). Later he transcribed and recorded it for piano solo, in which form it has become a recital favorite.
One of the most successful of Rachmaninoff’s relatively few works for chamber ensemble is the Sonata for Cello and Piano in G minor, Opus 19, completed in 1901 and dedicated to his friend the cellist Anatoly Brandukov (1856–1930). Brandukov and Rachmaninoff gave the premiere in Moscow on December 15, 1901. Robust and confident, the sonata seems to reflect Rachmaninoff’s happy state of mind after the successful premiere of his Second Piano Concerto had resurrected his career. As many commentators have noted, the piano almost steals the show from the cello here. The opening movement in particular includes several cadenza-like passages for the piano. But the intricate and lively dialogue between the instruments in exchanging the second movement’s downward-driving theme displays ingenuity and a keen sense of drama. The third movement, Andante, boasts one of Rachmaninoff’s most inspired and sublime melodies, a soulful aria for the cello, while the finale presents two contrasting ideas—one plangent, the other pulsing with rhythmic tension—in a tempestuous struggle that ends with a fiery vivace coda.
It should come as no surprise that the late-Romantic composer Rachmaninoff had a special fondness for the music of the earlier Romantic Robert Schumann (1810–1856). Rachmaninoff often included Schumann pieces in recitals, and the 1929 recording of Schumann’s Carnaval ranks among his best. In 1840, his fabled “year of song,” Schumann completed the song cycle Liederkreis, Opus 39, a collection of twelve songs to texts by Joseph von Eichendorff. Auf einer Burg (In a Castle) tells an enigmatic tale of time and the river Rhine as seen from the eyes of an ancient statue on the castle ramparts that looks down on a wedding procession led by a weeping bride.
The American songs Conrad Tao has chosen for improvisations include classic jazz standards by Billy Strayhorn, Broadway hits by Irving Berlin and Stephen Sondheim, and a tune written for one of the most beloved films of all time. Berlin’s 1921 Tin Pan Alley favorite “All By Myself,” a lament on the misery of growing old alone, soon became a pop classic recorded by Bing Crosby, Pat Boone, Ella Fitzgerald, and others. Over the years several other composers used the same title for their songs, including Eric Carmen’s 1975 smash hit based on the second movement of Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto.
William Thomas Strayhorn (1915–1967, left), known as Billy, worked closely with bandleader Duke Ellington for 25 years. Ellington once called him “my right arm, my left arm, all the eyes in the back of my head, my brain waves in his head, and his in mine.” Strayhorn’s joyful anthem to Manhattan, “Take the ‘A’ Train,” written in 1939 to lyrics by Lee Gaines and Joya Sherrill, became The Duke Ellington Orchestra’s signature tune with Ellington at the keyboard. Strayhorn’s other songs on this program, “Daydream” (1939) and “Lush Life” (1933–36), are more bluesy and free-form, and have since been arranged for trumpet, saxophone, and other instruments.
Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021) wrote both music and lyrics for the bittersweet ballad “In Buddy’s Eyes” from the 1971 show Follies, which depicts a reunion of former showgirls in a theater about to be demolished. Here the character Sally ruefully describes her apparently happy married life as she tries to forget a youthful romance.
Harold Arlen wrote the music and Yip Harburg the lyrics for “Over the Rainbow,” heard in the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz. Young Dorothy, played by Judy Garland, sings this yearning plea for happiness near the beginning of the film as she muses about going to a place where “there isn’t any trouble,” far away from tornado-prone Kansas. Soon afterwards she is transported to the magical land of Oz. “Over the Rainbow” became one of the most popular American songs ever written, expressing the dreams and aspirations of all people for a calm and carefree life under clear blue skies. — © Harlow Robinson
Pianist and composer Conrad Tao possesses an encyclopedic artistic approach and vision, and participates in a stunning array of innovative and impactful projects. Conrad’s 2024–25 season has included a return to Carnegie Hall performing Debussy’s 12 Études alongside Keyed In, a work arranged and improvised by Tao on the Lumatone. He also returns to the San Francisco Symphony to perform Tchaikovsky with Nicholas Collon, the Dallas Symphony to perform Mozart with Jaap van Zweden, the St. Louis Symphony to perform Saint-Saëns with David Danzmayr, and the Baltimore Symphony to perform Mozart with Jonathon Heyward. He also continues his Bessie award-winning collaboration with dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher in a nationwide U.S. tour. In the 2023–24 season Conrad made his subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and reunited with the New York Philharmonic. The season also saw celebrations of the 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue at the Philharmonie Berlin, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, and the Concertgebouw Amsterdam. Flung Out, Conrad’s companion piece to Gershwin’s Rhapsody, was commissioned by the Santa Rosa Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, and Omaha Symphony. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist.
Born in Oklahoma, Benjamin Lanners, twenty-six, is a cellist from a musical family. He has performed in halls across Asia, Europe, and the United States and collaborated in concert with Roberto Diaz, Jon Kimura Parker, and Paul Watkins among others. An advocate for new music, Ben has worked closely with composers Tania León, Osvaldo Golijov, Steve Mackey, and Joan Tower. He spent the summer of 2024 at Tanglewood as the acting cellist of the Fromm String Quartet, a select ensemble sponsored by the Fromm New Music Foundation of Harvard. Other festival experience includes the National Youth Orchestra USA, Manchester Music Festival, Taipei Music Academy and Festival, and the Tanglewood Music Festival. Lanners began piano at the age of four and later studied cello, double bass, Spanish, and music theory at Oklahoma State University. He holds degrees from Rice University and the Yale School of Music, and is currently a doctoral student at the Rice University Shepherd School of Music studying with Norman Fischer and Desmond Hoebig. Ben is a 2025 New Horizons Fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School. Praised for his rich and powerful tone, Lanners performs on a 1997 Montagnana model cello by Lawrence Wilke.
