program notes {
An exponent of Busoni’s rarely
programmed piano concerto, Ohlsson
performed it with the National Symphony
and London’s Barbican with the BBC
Symphony Orchestra this past fall. This
January marks the centenary of the death
of Alexander Scriabin whose piano music
Ohlsson will present in a series of recitals
in London, San Francisco, Chicago and
New York. He will also return to the
orchestras of San Francisco, Detroit,
Dallas, Baltimore, BBC Scotland, and
Prague where he is a frequent guest.
About the concert:
Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Born in Oneg, Russia, April 1, 1873; died in
Beverly Hills, California, March 28, 1943
Composers have dedicated their works
to many different sorts of people: royal
patrons, family members, soloists, conductors. But, to the best of this writer’s
knowledge, only one work has been
dedicated to the composer’s psychiatrist:
Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto
to Dr. Nikolai Dahl, who, by freeing
Rachmaninoff of his creative block, had
made this work possible.
In 1897, Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony — a work in which he had great
faith — was given a dreadfully inept
premiere in St. Petersburg. Unable to
separate a promising new work from a bad
performance, the critics gave the sensitive
23-year-old composer reviews that would
devastate even a more seasoned artist. César
Cui’s wrote: “If there were a conservatory
in Hell, if one of its talented students were
instructed to write a program symphony on
the ‘Seven Plagues of Egypt,’ and if he were
to compose a symphony like Mr. Rachmaninoff’s, then he would have fulfilled
his task brilliantly and would delight the
inhabitants of Hell.” Rachmaninoff withdrew the symphony and would never let it
be performed again. He sank into a deep
depression. Despite a standing commission
from the London Philharmonic to write a
piano concerto, for several years he created
almost nothing.
Dr. Nikolai Dahl was an internist who
dabbled in the i