Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 3

Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto was composed in 1909, and premiered by the composer as the soloist in his first American tour that year. The work is scored for solo piano, two flutes, two oboes, ,two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, one tuba, timpani, percussions and strings. Duration is approximately 44 minutes.


Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto is sui generis. And its far-reaching complexities of texture and form yield, if not complexities, intensifications of sentiment. Its melancholy is epic, novelistic.

If Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto shows the influence of Grieg or Tchaikovsky (as in the construction of the finale), the third draws inspiration from Liszt’s two concertos: their interpenetration of piano and orchestra, including dialogues between the keyboard and solo strings or winds; their ingenious thematic transformations. In Liszt, these priorities yield compression: compact, single-movement works without cadenzas. In Rachmaninoff, they promote expansion: three huge movements, and a first-movement cadenza of unprecedented weight and scope.

The Third Concerto’s opening theme, as so often in Rachmaninoff, is small in compass (its range rarely exceeds a fifth) but a mile long. Its simplicity makes it wonderfully malleable; it infiltrates the entire work. At first glance, it seems an unlikely candidate for grandiose distension. And Rachmaninoff grandly distends it only once, in a guise both startling and shrewd: this is the theme that dominates the big cadenza. That is: to drive the tune to its apotheosis, Rachmaninoff assigns it not to the orchestra (common practice), but to the heroic solo protagonist. The piano displaces the orchestra – whose interventions serve to soothe and soften the cadenza towards intimacy.

And so the cadenza is partly accompanied; by solo flute, oboe, clarinet, and horn. Even more unusual: instead of taking its accustomed place in between the recapitulation and coda, it is itself the movement’s recapitulation. It reviews the materials; it scales the central climax; it prepares the denouement. Its rare breadth seals its great height. It gambles the entire concerto – and wins.

In the second movement, the soloist enters with an onslaught whose chromatic and polyphonic intensity seems irrational, even atonal, at first. Its purpose, gradually  revealed, is to jar and tug the music, which the orchestra (listening to the first movement’s D minor close) had begun in A major, into far-flung D-flat. And yet the movement proves an arresting respite; Rachmaninoff titles it “Intermezzo.” Midway through (as in the Andantino semplice of Tchaikovsky’s First Concerto) the music gently accelerates into a dizzy, high-velocity waltz – whose orchestral melody and keyboard accompaniment (as not in the Tchaikovsky concerto) both derive from the first movement’s protean main theme.

Big piano concertos risk stranding their finales, which must balance muscular first movements. Here, Rachmaninoff solves the finale problem with two strategies. First, he amplifies the rondo structure with a singular episode, midway through: while the harmony sits immobile, in E-flat major, the piano invents a series of scherzando variations on motives derived from the first movement (its second theme) and the finale’s lively main subject; meanwhile, the orchestra matches it in deftness. A floating fantasy.

The second strategy is familiar, but carried out with new aplomb. As in the Second Concerto and Second Symphony (and the Grieg Concerto and the Tchaikovsky First Concerto), the movement’s second theme returns, triumphantly elongated, at the close. But, more than swollen, it is here artfully transformed. In fact, as first heard, this tune was no tune at all, but a two-fisted chordal barrage, rising and receding four times. Next, it turned lyric, singing quietly over rotating triplets. Heralded by a build-up replete with mini-cadenza and trumpet fanfares, the concerto’s last, cresting melodic surge incorporates and supersedes both these variants, clinching an eventful motivic history.

Does this jubilant D major ending clear the air? A good question. There has been motivic growth, but also some backsliding: the opening chant twice returns as a beckoning siren song. It is the music in the solo winds that pacifies the first movement cadenza. And it similarly becalms the finale’s scherzando interlude. Its undertow – a vortex of melancholy and nostalgia – retards or resists the concerto’s trajectory toward affirmative closure. These are powerful and productive tensions less apparent in the Second Concerto or Second Symphony.

Two postscripts. The first movement cadenza so crucial to this concerto exists in two versions, identical from the climax on but with different beginnings. Rachmaninoff himself played the shorter version, and so did nearly everyone else (including Vladimir Horowitz) until Van Cliburn came along with his 1958 gold medal in the Tchaikovsky International Piano Competition.

Like the Second Symphony, the Third Concerto was once typically abridged in performance. According to Michael Steinberg, Rachmaninoff himself played the concerto complete at least as late as 1919, but by 1935 was making one cut in each of the three movements. For his recording in 1939-40, he added a second cut in the finale. These cuts were once widely adapted, but no longer.

-Joseph Horowitz