Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony

Rach 2. I love Rach 2.

Last night, the orchestra I play in performed Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 (“Rach 2”). It is a symphony I adore and have done since the first time the LGSO (lgso.org.uk) performed it in my first season on the viola, on a sweltering evening at St John’s Smith Square in 2017. That night we also played Stravinsky’s Petrushka Suite. A very Russian affair. I assume some vodka was involved too.

Rach 2 has everything I want in a big Romantic Russian. And what is that?

I want a dark dramatic opening:

And I want grand, luscious, airy string melodies (and look at the quiet ecstasy on Petrenko’s face in this clip with the Oslo Phil):

I want a fiendish fugue that takes me to the brink of madness and carpal tunnel:

And I want a apogee that takes me to the brink of the divine:

Rach 2 marks the composer’s triumph over a long-set depression that had dogged him since the disastrous premier of his first symphony. In his second, the light catches a glint of that victory over nihilism, made all the more satisfying by the fact that Rachmaninoff was by all accounts a thoroughly good guy.

Mahler said of his own second symphony - written twenty years before Rachmaninoff’s - that he had no idea how he managed to write the ending and would never be able to do so again. I’m not sure Rachmaninoff ever equalled his second symphony, at least not with the full, earth-shattering force of the orchestra (maybe the third piano concerto).

It is a truly splendid symphony, and I’ve got the bruised collar bone and sore wrists to prove it.

Rach 2. I love Rach 2.