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When Rachmaninoff came to write his Third Piano Concerto, he had a far different problem from the one that had faced him when composing the Second. At the time he started the earlier concerto, there was a question whether he would ever compose again at all. His confidence and self-esteem had been shattered by the catastrophic premiere of his First Symphony in 1897. It took Rachmaninoff two years to develop the courage to compose again, and then only after extensive counseling sessions, partly under hypnosis, with a psychiatrist. The result, though, was the C minor Concerto, which was instantly established as an audience favorite.

Thus, by 1909, when he began work on the Third, he had to compete with his younger self. In addition to the success of the Second Concerto, his Second Symphony had just won the Glinka Award, beating out Skryabin’s Poem of Ecstasy for the honor. He spent the summer of 1909 planning his first American tour, which began in Northampton, Massachusetts, in early November and continued until January. But the culminating event took place in New York City on November 28 when he premiered the new piano concerto with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Society. The same forces repeated it two days later at Carnegie Hall and Rachmaninoff played it once more on January 16, 1910, this time with the Philharmonic, Mahler conducting. It was considered a qualified success—respected, though by no means the instant hit of the previous concerto.

The general tone from critics who had heard the work three times in the space of seven weeks was that, despite its many and undoubted beauties, the concerto was too long and rather full of notes. The New York Herald predicted that “it will doubtless take rank among the most interesting piano concertos of recent years,” but added the observation as true today as it was then that “its great length and extreme difficulties bar it from performances by any but pianists of exceptional technical powers.”

Of course, Rachmaninoff himself was a pianist of “exceptional technical powers,” among the most utterly gifted keyboard artists of all time, and he was writing specifically for himself. Yet he opened the concerto not with a stunning blast of virtuosity but rather with a muted muttering in the strings of a subdued march character and then, after two measures, a long, simple melody presented in bare octaves in the piano. Like so many Russian tunes and so many of Rachmaninoff’s, this one circles through a limited space, only gradually reaching up or down to achieve a new high or low note. Rachmaninoff was often asked whether this was a folk tune, and he always insisted that it was completely original and had simply come into his mind freely while working on the concerto. Joseph Yasser discovered a marked similarity between this theme and an old Russian monastic chant, which the composer might have heard as a boy while visiting local monasteries around Novgorod with his grandmother. The distant, buried memory of the chant might then have appeared unbidden, further shaped by the mature composer as the concerto’s main theme. In any case, its essential Russianness is palpable.

The theme and its rustling accompaniment both play a role in the progress of the movement. The orchestra takes over the theme while the piano brings rapid figuration to a solo climax in preparation for the second theme. This begins a dialogue between soloist and orchestra, emphasizing a rhythmic motive that soon appears in a leisurely, romantic cantabile melody sung by the piano. A literal restatement of the concerto’s opening bars marks the beginning of the development, which employs mostly material from the main theme and its accompaniment. This culminates in a gigantic solo cadenza which takes the place of the normal recapitulation, commenting in extenso on the motivic figures of the principal theme, then the secondary theme; after its close, only a brief reference to both themes suffices to bring the movement to a close.

The slow movement, Intermezzo, seems to start in a normal key, A major (the dominant of D minor) with a brief languishing figure in the strings that generates an elegiac mood in its extensive development. But the piano enters explosively to break the mood and carry us to the decidedly unexpected key of D-flat, where Rachmaninoff presents a sumptuous and lavishly harmonized version of the main theme in a texture filled with dense chords from the piano. A bright contrast comes in a seemingly new theme, presented as a light waltz in 3/8 time, heard in the solo clarinet and bassoon against sparkling figuration in the piano. But Rachmaninoff has a very subtle trick up his sleeve here: the “new” theme is, in fact, note-for-note the opening theme of the entire concerto, but beginning at a different pitch level of the scale (the third instead of the tonic) and so changed in its rhythm as to conceal the connection almost perfectly. It would be easy to hear the concerto many times and still completely miss this “underground” link that nonetheless helps tie the movements together. This passage leads back to D-flat and an orchestral restatement of the opening. The soloist “interrupts” the end of the slow movement with a brief cadenza that leads back to the home key of D minor for the Finale.

This is the ne plus ultra of virtuosic concerto finales, filled with impetuous and dashing themes, rhythmically driving, syncopated, and sunny by turns. An extended scherzando section in E-flat fills the middle of the movement. It involves both acrobatic and lightly spooky variations on a capricious theme that seems new at first but turns out to be related to the opening of the finale and the second theme of the first movement. Moreover, between the increasingly ornate miniature variations Rachmaninoff inserts a reminder of both themes of the first movement. Following the restatement of all the thematic material, the piano builds a long and exciting coda that brings this most brilliant and challenging of concertos to a flashing, glamorous close.—© Steven Ledbetter