HOW RACHMANINOFF GOT HIS GROOVE BACK
by Arielle Gordon
My sister invited me to a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 at Carnegie Hall, performed by Orchestre Métropolitain de Montréal. It was something she usually did with my grandma; the two shared a love of Russian composers. When I inherited my grandma’s cabriolet, a golden 2003 Toyota Solara, the bass on the stereo was totally busted, but she had no idea. She only played WQXR: New York’s Classical Music Radio Station, which was evidently light on the low end. I put on a dress and took the train uptown.
“If there were a conservatory in Hell, and if one of its gifted pupils were to be given a task to write a symphony on the subject of the Seven Plagues of Egypt, and if he had written a work like Rachmaninoff’s, he would have acquitted himself splendidly and received an enthusiastic response from the local inhabitants of Hell.” This is what César Cui wrote about Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 1 when it debuted in St. Petersburg in 1897.
Cui had beef with everyone—Tchaikovsky, ostensibly his peer in the “Mighty Five” group of composers, called him “loathsome”—but I guess Rachmaninoff couldn’t take the heat. He was kind of a vibes guy, writing his symphonies in one fell swoop as inspiration struck; for him, a critique of his music was a critique of his core person, his intuition. He fell into a deep depression for three years. He saw a hypnotherapist, Nikolai Dahl, who cured him by making him recite what we today might call “self-affirmations”: “You will begin to write your concerto. You will work with the greatest of ease. The concerto will be of excellent quality.” He dedicated his follow-up, Concerto No. 2, to Dahl.
I read all of this in the playbill. I thought about Charles Mingus, whose psychotherapist, Edmund Pollock, wrote the liner notes for his 1963 album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady after helping him recover from a hellish performance at New York’s Town Hall the previous year. “He is painfully aware of his feelings and he wants desperately to heal them.” When I listen to “Duet Solo Dancers,” I think I can hear what Pollack meant by, “He tries to tell people he is in great pain and anguish because he loves” when the trumpet begins to sound like a man wordlessly crying out around the four minute and thirty second mark. He was down, bad.
I was painfully aware of my feelings. I was sitting in my stiff red theater seat. I felt the hair on my arms stand up. The piano was a life raft for Rachmaninoff when he was out at sea; he performed as a concert pianist to make ends meet as he recovered from Cui’s devastation. In the beginning of the concerto, that’s all we hear: a pianist clawing out of a deep despair through the instrument’s dynamic scale. When the cellos come in on the low end soon after, I think about my grandma’s Solara. How could she not have noticed the bass?
Maybe you know this, but I didn’t: Eric Carmen stole the melody to his biggest hit, 1975’s “All By Myself,” from the second movement of Concerto No. 2. He said he thought he could use it without crediting the composer because Rachmaninoff had been dead for more than 30 years. He was wrong. He said, “That stuff gave me goosebumps every time I listened to it.” That part made sense to me.
I was thinking about all this because I was “livin’ alone,” just like the protagonist in Carmen’s song. I was single for the first time in seven years, all by myself, as it were. It was my fault, but that didn’t make it hurt less. I was devastated. I was plagued. I was not able to take the heat. I was in Hell, and the music didn’t sound anything like Rachmaninoff’s first symphony. I agreed to go to Carnegie Hall mostly to get out of my apartment, where mostly I sat around wondering if I should start Wellbutrin. I thought that Rachmaninoff’s Concerto No. 2 would have sounded a lot different if he had access to Wellbutrin.
“One of the bleakest rock albums ever recorded.” That is what the music critic Ken Tucker wrote about Alex Chilton’s Like Flies on Sherbert. It was Chilton’s first solo record after the disbandment of his second band Big Star, a band he considered a failure at the time compared to his years as a teen idol in The Box Tops. I don’t listen to Like Flies on Sherbert much, but I did get really into his follow up during my breakup. Bach’s Bottom, released in 1981, has nothing to do with classical music, actually. It’s a pun on “Box” from his first band and the term “rock bottom.” It has a song I listened to a lot during this time: “Take Me Home and Make Me Like It.” Chilton sounds an absolute wreck here, begging for sex, humiliation, or death, any attention better than none. “Cut my guts,” he pleads. I thought about how for Rachmoninoff, he fell into silence when critics hated the debut. I thought about how Chilton trudged ahead. I want to be Rachmaninoff, but I think I’m Chilton. I looked for the song at my local karaoke spot, Shenanigans, and they don’t have it, so I asked to sing it a cappella. I got to “call me a slut in front of your family,” before the bartender pulled the plug.
How do you look at someone after you’ve heard Rachmaninoff’s second concerto? I tried to pretend I hadn’t been crying. It had the swelling acoustics to render even the most stone-faced listener weepy, but given my present circumstances, my tears made me feel naked. I left the concert hall and stood outside in the rain with my sister and my grandma.
“Wow,” I said after a moment. We hugged. I walked to the downtown Q train and put on a different Chilton song on that same rock bottom album, “Free Again.” “I’m free again to end my longing, to be out on my own again.” I ignored the hiccup in his voice, the kind you get when you’re drunk or attempting to stifle a sob. This time, I chose to believe him.
Quarter Notes Magazine 