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Rachmaninoff d-flat major2/12/2024 ![]() ![]() But as Rachmaninoff's studies intensified, he shifted his focus exclusively to music, finishing his First Piano Concerto at age 18 and his First Symphony four years later, with an opera, Aleko, in between. He seemed poised to become one of classical music's great sportsmen, in the league of Charles Ives (who pitched his high school baseball team to a win against Yale) and Percy Grainger (who would often as not walk between engagements in various cities). ![]() Photo illustration by Jeff Curnow/Wikimedia Commons//Library of Congress Rachmaninoff (top) briefly joined a troupe of travelling Japanese acrobats. It was only a clash with a powerful London promoter that caused Rachmaninoff, born on this day in 1873, to return to his piano and music desk for good. According to a team of researchers at Harbeson University in Delaware, Rachmaninoff's mid-20s were spent not in semi-seclusion at a series of dachas, as his biographers have claimed, but on the well-trod boards of English music halls, where he performed some of the era's most amazing feats of strength. New scholarship has discovered a fascinating chapter in the life of the multitalented musician and a fresh set of answers to the perplexing questions of his youthful artistic decline and revival. ![]() But he did, a well-documented three-year fallow period after the dismal premiere of his First Symphony, during which he performed little and wrote even less. ![]() Listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff's sweeping, luxuriantly Romantic music - his Second Symphony, his Second Piano Concerto - and it's hard to imagine that this towering figure of 20th century music ever had a crisis of confidence. Photo illustration by Jeff Curnow/Wikimedia Commons/Library of CongressĮditor's note on April 4, 2016: You may have figured this out already - this story was an April Fools' joke. A London critic wrote, "It was such a spectacle as has rarely been seen anywhere in the Empire." After his First Symphony flopped, Sergei Rachmaninoff briefly switched careers. ![]()
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