{"id":3738,"date":"2025-12-04T23:45:59","date_gmt":"2025-12-05T04:45:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3738"},"modified":"2025-12-06T00:47:29","modified_gmt":"2025-12-06T05:47:29","slug":"cho-plays-rachmaninoff-an-astonishing-paganini-rhapsody","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/12\/cho-plays-rachmaninoff-an-astonishing-paganini-rhapsody.html","title":{"rendered":"Cho Plays Rachmaninoff — An Astonishing Paganini Rhapsody"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Seong-Jin<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

I distinctly remember when I discovered that Rachmaninoff was a great composer. It happened decades ago, when twentieth century music meant Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I was driving and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini<\/em> came up on the radio. The piece was hardly new to me, but I had never paid much attention. This music has all the Stravinsky virtues, I thought: concision, originality, wit. And yet the range of color and feeling is more expansive. And \u2013 as almost never in Stravinsky \u2013 the inspiration never sags. As I have subsequently discovered, it also wears well. It\u2019s a twentieth century masterpiece.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachmaninoff himself regarded Benno Moiseiwitsch as the supreme interpreter of his Rhapsody. And Moisewitsch\u2019s 1938 recording<\/a>, notwithstanding a scrappy accompaniment by the London Philharmonic under Basil Cameron, remains magical. This pianist\u2019s distinctive touch is soft, subtle, lucid. His elegance and sophistication are bewitching. But the recording\u2019s coup is the Rhapsody\u2019s most famous moment (start at 13:30): t<\/strong>he transition from the Hades darkness of the seventeenth variation to the healing D-flat major of variation eighteen. Independently savoring  every melodic strand, Moiseiwitsch navigates the immortal  tune toward its climax \u2013 and then, unforgettably, inverts the intended dynamic swell and drops to pianissimo. Never in recorded history was a piano more beautifully played.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rachmaninoff\u2019s own premiere recording<\/a>,<\/strong> four years earlier with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra, is notably different: heavier, more heroic, sometimes acerbic, rigorously unsentimental. No other pianist in my experience attains a comparable gravitas in this music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, Seong-Jin Cho assayed the Rhapsody on a<\/em> Theme by Paganini<\/em> in collaboration with Manfred Honeck and the Pittsburgh Symphony. Born and raised in Korea, now 31 years old, he is perhaps the most knowingly acclaimed pianist of his generation. I was hearing him in live performance for the first time. What first impresses is the keenness and subtlety of his ear: his precise calibration of voicing and tone, of pedaling and dynamics. Pummeling the keys at full throttle, sustaining a rapt quietude at the softest possible volume, his poise remains imperturbable. In comparison to the recordings of Moiseiwitsch or Rachmaninoff, Cho was super-fast in the faster variations. Perhaps something was lost in clarity of articulation (I was sitting downstairs, where the sound swims). But because Cho never seemed rushed or pressed, the thrill of the chase prevailed. The lyric variations were breathtaking.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a series of recent blogs, I\u2019ve found myself pondering the rapid disappearance from the keyboard world of \u201cnational\u201d schools of interpretation. To my ears, Jean-Efflam Bavouzet\u2019s Ravel thrives on \u201cFrench\u201d clarity of rhythm and articulation, enforced with aesthetic rigor. Sergei Babayan\u2019s heroic sonorities and sweeping rubatos sustain a \u201cRussian\u201d school. Yunchan Lim \u2013 a 21-year-old Korean already as famous as Cho \u2013 also goes his own way with poetic sincerity. But his new recording of Tchaikovsky\u2019s The Seasons<\/em> is a mistake \u2013 these are pieces, it seems to me, that need to sound \u201cRussian\u201d in order to cast a spell.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cho\u2019s Rach\/Pag is original, not remotely \u201cRussian.\u201d But I find that I do not care: even juxtaposing Moiseiwitsch and Rachmaninoff, it\u2019s evident that the Paganini Rhapsody (composed in 1934, by which time Rachmaninoff had long been abroad and even absorbed a whiff of American jazz) invites a range of approaches. Crucially, Wednesday\u2019s performance was deeply collaborative. Cho\u2019s sonic imagination, his quicksilver range of color and sensibility, his affinity for stillness on the verge of silence, were acutely partnered by Honeck and his players.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concert closed with Shostakovich\u2019s Fifth. This 1937 symphony, composed in a spirit of repentance, is often regarded as a kind of cop-out. Re-encountering it for the first time in years,  I have to agree. It\u2019s tighter and simpler than the sprawling Shostakovich of Nos. 4, 7, 8, and 10 \u2013 and less enveloping. Its most remarkable feature \u2013 also its most controversial \u2013 is a slow-motion stentorian ending. An unforgettable description, by the composer himself (in Solomon Volkov\u2019s Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich<\/em>), likens these final pounding measures to \u201cforced rejoicing.\u201d To fully register in performance, they demand a bleak machine intensity from the violins, itself predicated on a condition of hyper-commitment that I do not associate with today\u2019s American orchestras. For hyper-commitment, listen to old broadcasts by Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony (try their Francesca da Rimini<\/em>), or Dmitri Mitropoulos in Minneapolis or New York, or Toscanini with his NBC Symphony, or the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra under Ettore Panizza and Artur Bodanzky<\/a>. The most astounding orchestra I ever encountered in live performance was Evgeny Mravinsky\u2019s Leningrad Philharmonic when it toured the US in 1962. I missed the program with Shostakovich\u2019s Eighth \u2013 but I\u2019m sure it was the real deal. Today\u2019s Berlin Philharmonic has a first violin section that looks and sounds like a congregation of concertmasters. That\u2019s what can clinch Shostakovich\u2019s Fifth. Otherwise, Honeck and his Pittsburgh players were formidable. They have forged a unity. Their purposes, moment to moment, are never in doubt. In my experience, no other American orchestra regularly enjoys the services of a conductor as gifted in the standard repertoire.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A cavil: the concert began with a New York premiere: Lera Auerbach\u2019s Frozen Dreams<\/em>, 12 minutes long. That is: it hewed to a tired template: a token new work, then furniture moving, then a concerto, intermission, and a symphony. The first half might have begun with the piano already onstage, and Rachmaninoff\u2019s Vocalise <\/em>as a magical prelude to the Rhapsody.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

P.S. \u2013 Seong-Jin Cho returns to Carnegie for a solo recital on April 12. His program is nothing if not original:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bach B-flat Partita<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schoenberg: Suite, Op. 25<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Schumann: Faschingsschwank aus Wien<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Chopin: Waltzes (complete)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a related blog about Yunchan Lim, click <\/em>here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Sergei Babayan, <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Yuja Wang, <\/em>here<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

About Rachmaninoff \u2013 use this blog’s finding aid. I am still recuperating from modernist caricatures of a great composer who was also a great man.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I distinctly remember when I discovered that Rachmaninoff was a great composer. It happened decades ago, when twentieth century music meant Stravinsky and Schoenberg. I was driving and the Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini came up on the radio. The piece was hardly new to me, but I had never paid much attention. This […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3738","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-Yi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3738"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3750,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions\/3750"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}