A Rachmaninoff Cello Concerto?

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Back in 2001, the cellist Rafael Wallfisch recorded the Grieg Sonata as the Grieg "Cello Concerto" in a version orchestrated by Benjamin Wallfisch and Joseph Horovitz. In Gramophone, the reviewer suggested that he would love to hear an orchestral arrangement of the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata. I was kind of shocked, but could not resist the challenge of looking at the piece and seeing if this was remotely possible. What became clear is that if you were to simply orchestrate the piano part and keep the cello part intact that it would not work at all. For the music to be effective, you would have to swamp the cello part repeatedly, and in many passages where the cello carries the melody,the busy piano part would convert to a busy orchestral part that would be even harder to suppress than the piano. Further, I thought that in the Grieg arrangement the non-virtuoso cello part against the full orchestral writing sounded odd. Unlike at least one reviewer, I thought it was way too clear that I was listening to an arrangement of a piece of chamber music.

So the verdict was generally against the idea. But then I asked myself, what would happen if we took some of those virtuoso lines and transferred them-mutatis mutandis-to the cello? Could you achieve something that would have that Rachmaninoff virtuoso flair but written for the cello?

Over time, this idea evolved into the idea of transforming the music of Rachmaninoff into a Cello Concerto by making the relationship between the Cello part and the orchestra different than that between the cello and the piano in the Sonata. I rewrote a number of the piano licks as cello lines, getting advice from cellists on how to make that work. At the climaxes, where the cello part is, of necessity, swamped by the other notes, I took the cello line and doubled it in other parts of the orchestra and marked the solo part ad lib.

I came up with a version that we did with soloist Zoran Stillin and the Southern Arizona Symphony in 2003. The audience responded really well. I thought the idea worked, but the actual arrangement needed serious revision. I did not go far enough in rethinking the work for Cello and Orchestra. The orchestral scoring was too thick, and there were times when the big tunes were swamped as badly-or even worse- than they were in the original. In a number of places the cello should have been brought up an octave to cut through the orchestra better, and I should have been bolder in giving piano lines to the cello.

The revision I did this summer is pretty radical, so much so that I thought of changing the title from "Symphony-Concerto" to "Concerto", as the cello part is significantly more prominent in this version, and the scoring is much lighter. I did not try to make the orchestration sound like Rachmaninoff's, although it often does, simply because the music demands it. But Rachmaninoff never dealt with the specific problems of this type of scoring. He never tried to orchestrate any of his overtly pianistic works, and even when he agreed to let Resphigi orchestrate five of the Etudes-Tableaux, the works he chose for orchestration were admirably suited to the task.

We will see how well it works in rehearsal, but I am pretty excited about the possibility of this being taken up by other cellists. At least in my head, it really works now. I am very grateful to Peter Eom for being the guinea pig on this new version of the score. We will perform it on October 23 at the Scottsdale Center for the Performing Arts as part of our season opening concert of the MusicaNova Orchestra.

I will blog again on another interesting aspect of the process of creating this score, which is the extent to which it is still 'the Rachmaninoff Cello Sonata".