Rachmaninoff: String Quartet No. 1 (1889)
Romance:- Andante espressivo
Scherzo :- Allegro

For many of us, Sergei Rachmaninoff (his own spelling!) is THE musician’s musician: one of the greatest pianists of all time, a celebrated conductor, composer of some of the most loved and deeply human music in the literature: how ever was it possible that one and the same person, whose playing dazzled audiences in Europe and the USA from 1918 onwards (following his self-imposed exile from Russia/USSR), could also produce music of such colourful intensity and spacious grandeur as the second symphony, or of such harmonic and rhythmic complexity as his great choral symphony The Bells (his own favourite work)and the late Symphonic Dances? “Genius” has to be the very simple answer! However, like virtually all his compatriots before him, chamber music did not feature strongly in his output, the most important items featuring the piano, needless to say: just two “Elegiac Trios” and the cello sonata.

The present Romance and Scherzo constitute the first of two unsuccessful attempts to complete a string quartet, of which there are only two extant movements from each. It was while still a student at the Moscow Conservatoire that he produced what would appear to be two middle movements of a projected larger work – clearly drawing on the language of his predecessors: the Romance comes over as pure Tchaikovsky, and Borodin might especially be recalled in the Scherzo. His second attempt at a quartet survives in sketch form only, from as far apart as 1896 (a first movement?) and another Andante around 1913.

© Alan George
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