Proformed by Yo-Yo Ma and Emanuel Ax .
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff, 1 April 1873 [O.S. 20 March] 28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom which included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.
Understandably, the piano figures prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output, either as a solo instrument or as part of an ensemble. He made it a point, however, to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody. In some of his early orchestral pieces he showed the first signs of a talent for tone painting, which he would perfect in The Isle of the Dead, and he began to show a similar penchant for vocal writing in two early sets of songs, Opp. 4 and 8. Rachmaninoff's masterpiece, however, is his choral symphony The Bells, in which all of his talents are fused and unified
Sergei Rachmaninoff's Cello Sonata in G minor, op. 19, a sonata for cello and piano, was composed in 1901 and published a year later. As typical of sonatas in the Romantic period, it has four movements. Rachmaninoff disliked calling it a cello sonata because he thought the two instruments were equal. Because of this, it is often referred to as Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano. Most of the themes are introduced by the cello, while they are embellished and expanded in the piano's part. He dedicated it to Anatoliy Brandukov, who gave the first performance. It is hailed as one of the most important cello sonatas of the 20th century. |