Music director Andris Nelsons chose an all-Rachmaninoff program to open the BSO’s 2025 Tanglewood season on Saturday night (at Tanglewood the BSO normally opens its weekends on a Friday night, followed by concerts on Saturday night and Sunday afternoon). This year the fact that Friday was July 4^th, reserved over many years for James Taylor’s popular appearance here, motivated the change.)  So far as I know, Rachmaninoff has never been a composer given a full opening night place in the repertory however popular some of his works have been over the years. And this seems to reflect a new appreciation of his compositions from the middle years of the 20^th century, when modernist composers and like-minded critics considered his romantically lush works to be utterly old fashioned.

One of the most dramatic indications of this view was the article devoted to Rachmaninoff in the Fifth Edition of The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, published in 1950, which ran a few niggling paragraphs (about half a column) praising his superb brilliance as a pianist generally denigrating his music as over-emotion claptrap, and failing even to mention whole categories of his work, including operas and choral music. How different was the article written for the next edition (notably named The New Grove) in 1980, which ran to 8 ½ pages of biographical and analytical text, plus a complete list of works and a full-page listing of books and articles about him. The opening night devotion to two of his major works suggests that the composer has finally come into his own.

Of course, the principal piano concertos—especially the Second and Third, along with the Variations on a Theme of Paganini—have long been present in our concert life, first in the performances of the composer himself. Other pianists have taken them up with gratitude, though the Piano Concerto No. 3, completed as long ago as 1909, was for many years performed only by the composer, most of the other leading pianists being wary of its technical challenges and conductors and audiences finding it difficult to follow.

The performing challenges remain, but to judge from the extraordinarily enthusiastic response to the brilliant performance by Danil Trifonov, beautifully seconded by Nelsons and the orchestra, the work was fully welcomed by all.  This is a concerto in which the pianist almost never stops playing, starting from the simple Russian-style melody presented in bare octaves to the much larger quantity of bravura spectacle, from the gloomy D-minor of the opening to the bright and heroic D-major close.

The wild enthusiasm of the audience brought Trifonov and Nelsons on several times (Trifonov enthusiastically applauded the orchestra as well, even before Nelsons signaled featured players, and then asked the entire ensemble, to stand). The pianist granted the clear demand of the listeners for an encore, an Adagio from Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty in a transcription for solo piano by Dimitar Petkov.

After intermission, Nelsons led the orchestra in Rachmaninoff’s last work, Symphonic Dances, the only one he actually composed in America. He began it in 1940 and seems to have fused his essential Russianness with a tinge of Americanisms, especially hinting of jazz. As with all of his late works, he gave the honor of a world premiere to the Philadelphia Orchestra, where it received a fair reception. However, the New York critics panned it in its first appearance there. Though Eugene Ormandy had all of Rachmaninoff’s recent compositions, he never recorded the Symphonic Dances, which may be the reason why it languished largely unknown for a number of years. (The score waited 33 years for its first BSO performance, under Seiji Ozawa, in October 1974.) But it has gradually come to be recognized, by conductors and audiences, as one of Rachmaninoff’s finest scores.

Andris Nelsons balanced the varied, complex orchestral colors on Saturday evening, to allow the intermingling of orchestral families, as well as the many moments of solos, to make their full effect. Following the forceful rhythmic material of the opening, he allowed the lyrical saxophone solo (with backing from the other woodwinds) to be singularly expressive, a mood carried forth by the strings with delicate coloration from piano and harp. The magical closing theme of the movement had special meaning to the composer, though no one could have known it in 1941: he inserted a theme drawn from his First Symphony—which had received a single catastrophic performance 45 years earlier—converting it from its original dark, chantlike character into a consoling melody in the major against brightly kaleidoscopic figures elsewhere in the orchestra. At the time, the original manuscript of the symphony had been lost when Rachmaninoff left Russia; he assumed that no one would recognize this music. But two years after his death, the original performing parts were rediscovered. Now we can recognize this expressive close as the composer’s coming-to-terms at the end of his life with his greatest failure. We can almost hear that music saying, “Well, it’s all right after all.”

The remaining two movements have their own special colors and rhythms: the twisting, rather sour waltz music in the second movement (it was no time for joie de vivre in 1941), and the liturgical themes that form the basis of the third (the Dies irae, which he had used in several earlier works, and a passage borrowed from his a cappella All-Night Vigil of 1915, turned into an energetic dance, ending with its “alleluia.” Rachmaninoff may have suspected that this would be his last musical utterance, and he ended it with as expression of great positive energy and a personal expression written at the end of the score: “I thank Thee, Lord.” The Saturday performance inspired the audience to a second explosive round of enthusiastic applause. 

Steven Ledbetter is a freelance writer and lecturer on music. He got his BA from Pomona College and PhD from NYU in Musicology. He taught at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, then became program annotator at the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1979 to 1997.