Rachmaninoff once said that music is love.

“It’s for my Dad,” said Philip Glass of his genre-refreshing Violin Concerto No. 1. In some ways, Glass’s entire career owes its existence to his father Ben Glass, the music-loving owner of a Baltimore record store that provided Philip with no end of exploration, inspiration, and education.  

Glass came of age as a composer during a challenging time in Western musical history, when the forbidding cerebralism of the serialist movement held center stage. A compositional technique that employed serial mathematics to control all aspects of a composition, from pitch through rhythm to dynamics and more, serialism produced tightly organized music that came across as chaotic to listeners, who typically responded with indifference or even hostility. The esteemed composer Benjamin Britten, no fan of serialism, remarked that “it is insulting to address people in a language they don’t understand.”  

That all started changing as early as the 1960s, when young composers began seeking their inspiration in popular music such as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album or in world music such as the vibrant drumming patterns of African ensembles. Their attractive and approachable idiom came to be called minimalism, and despite considerable carping from musical intellectuals, it provided the breath of fresh air that 20th-century music desperately needed. (On a personal note, as a piano major in several leading American conservatories, I suffered through numerous head-banging rehearsals of forbiddingly complex serial compositions. I discovered minimalism in the 1970s via the San Francisco Conservatory’s New Music Ensemble; our director was the young John Adams, soon to be elevated to the topmost rank of American composers. Playing pieces such as Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians was liberating and gratifying – especially because audiences actually enjoyed, rather than endured, our performances.)  

An early adherent of minimalism, Glass made the happy discovery that the idiom is surprisingly well suited to opera, as he demonstrated with the landmark musical theater works Einstein on the Beach, Satyagraha, and Akhnaten. It was at this point – the mid 1980s when Glass was well into middle age – that composer-conductor Dennis Russell Davies encouraged him to begin writing purely instrumental compositions. The result was Violin Concerto No. 1, surely one of the most popular and influential concertos in the modern repertory. Glass wrote it (with his father in mind) for violinist Paul Zukofsky, who played the premiere in April 1987.  

It wasn’t taken all that seriously at first. Ridiculed was more like it. The major orchestras viewed it as a bubblegum ‘pops’ piece, far below their dignity. (Orchestras aren’t always trustworthy judges of musical worth, by the way; the lordly Vienna Philharmonic once referred to Stravinsky’s Petrushka as ‘dirty’ music and refused to play it.)  

But you can’t keep a good piece down, and Glass’s First Violin Concerto is a good piece and then some. Nowadays it’s played by just about everybody, as it should be. Glass dispenses with descriptive movement tempi and instead goes straight to the point with metronome marks. The opening movement proceeds at quarter note = 120 beats per minute, which is standard march (and disco) tempo. As such, it steps and struts right along, the violin given whirring arpeggios within the overall tippy-tap rhythms established by the orchestra.  

The exquisite second movement dips back into music history by channeling the old Baroque ostinato form, in which a cyclically recurring bass line is joined by constantly changing variations above. Such pieces may be labelled as passacaglias or chaconnes, terms that originated as dances but eventually became interchangeable labels for pieces in ostinato form. (There have been many sincere attempts to distinguish one from the other, but none ever quite pass muster.)  

Then comes the last movement, at the quickstep tempo of quarter note = 150. There’s an urgency here, enhanced by the use of triangle and woodblocks in addition to syncopated rhythms. Towards the end it slows down a bit, in a conclusion marked by heartfelt, wistful lyricism. 

It took a lot of nerve for Rachmaninoff to write a second symphony. The 1897 premiere of his first had been a debacle, as a shamefully incompetent performance under a reportedly drunken Alexander Glazunov had been followed by a communal lashing from Moscow critics. “If there were a Conservatory in Hell, and one of its students were to compose a symphony…” began one particularly venomous review. The failure of his first symphonic brainchild sent the thin-skinned Rachmaninoff into a deep depression and caused three years of compositional paralysis. A course of hypnotic therapy got Rachmaninoff back on his game via the popular and enduring Second Piano Concerto, completed in the autumn of 1900 and dedicated, quite appropriately, to his hypnotherapist.  

And yet Rachmaninoff shied away from another symphony for six more years. It was only while he was living in Dresden – where he had gone to escape from the demands of his conducting career and to focus on composition – that he took the plunge. This time around Rachmaninoff had developed into a seasoned master conductor, so he was on the podium in St. Petersburg for a splendidly performed 1908 premiere that scored a hit with audiences and critics alike. However, even the most enthusiastic of the early reviewers expressed reservations about the work’s whopping 65-minute length: “For a wider audience it may be slightly long…But how fresh it is! How beautiful!”  

For decades thereafter, most conductors thought of the Second Symphony as altogether too zaftig for comfort and subjected it to edits ranging from light trims to veritable chainsaw massacres. Nikolai Sokoloff’s pioneering 1928 recording with the Cleveland Orchestra, for example, scooped out a full twenty minutes. Even faithful stalwart Eugene Ormandy shaved off bits and pieces. Not until the 1970s did it become routine to perform and record the Second Symphony in its entirety. “It makes the symphony undeniably long, but I feel that its honesty, its power, its heart-felt lyricism can stand it” said André Previn regarding his influential 1973 recording with the London Symphony Orchestra. 

The Rachmaninoff Second continues the grand tradition of the late Romantic symphony as practiced by Tchaikovsky, Bruckner, and Mahler. As compared to the tight structural discipline practiced by such earlier masters as Beethoven, Mozart, and Haydn, Rachmaninoff treated musical form as a convenience, concentrating instead on the dramatic possibilities of complementary and contrasting melodies. In this he was following Tchaikovsky’s lead, even up to employing his celebrated predecessor’s device of a motto theme – i.e., a compact melodic figure that is used as a seed to generate themes throughout the work as well as acting as marker for important structural events.  

That motto is clearly stated by the cellos and basses at the very opening of the symphony. After a sustained slow introduction that gradually increases in tempo, the movement proper (marked Allegro moderato) commences with a variant of that motto theme. As the movement unfolds over its impressive course, subsequent themes continue to emerge from the implications of that initial motto, even if on first hearing the close kinship between the various melodies may not be immediately apparent.  

The second-place Scherzo movement opens with a propulsive statement of a Rachmaninoff “signature” theme – the Dies irae, a twelfth-century Gregorian chant from the Requiem mass that has become associated indelibly in the Western mind with death. A repeat visitor to Rachmaninoff’s works, the Dies irae might show up fairly unadorned (as in the closing passage of the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) or, as here, elaborated and ornamented. An ardent lyrical passage – loosely derived from the motto theme – provides contrast. The central episode is a scurrying march-like affair during which Rachmaninoff employs the classic procedure known as fugue – i.e., a technique of imitating a melodic figure throughout multiple instrumental lines. That melodic figure, called the fugue subject, is an accelerated and ornamented version of the Dies irae.  

The third movement stands rightfully amongst Rachmaninoff’s most memorable lyrical flights. Cast in three expanded sections, it begins with a languorous falling melody that is continued by what just might be the longest – and best – clarinet solo in the symphonic repertory. Eventually a soaring statement in the full strings leads to an ardent restatement of the initial melody to close the first section. The motto theme arrives in no uncertain terms as the mood darkens with a shift from major to minor mode, leading into an unsettled, mood-shifting central section that surges to a peak of unbridled passion. A fragmented, questioning transition leads to a quasi-recapitulatory third section, during which Rachmaninoff explores some fascinating combinatorial possibilities of his various themes.  

The finale is another greatly extended sonata-form movement, its blazing vitality peppered with reminiscences of earlier themes and even occasionally indulging in periods of somber reflection. In true Tchaikovskian fashion, the heartfelt secondary theme eventually emerges as the star of the show, played with all due passion by the massed strings before leading into a rambunctious final peroration.