Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40

라흐마니노프 — Library of Congress, Public Domain

Composer: Rachmaninoff
(Sergei Rachmaninoff, 1873–1943)
Work: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40
Composed: Sketched in Russia, 1914 → completed in the United States, 1926
(revised twice: 1928 and 1941)
Movements: 3 movements

I. Allegro vivace (alla breve) — G minor
II. Largo — C major
III. Allegro vivace — G minor

I. Vivace — a dark march
II. Largo — a song
III. Vivace — a compressed finish
Forces: Solo piano
2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons
4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba
Timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals
Strings
Premiere: March 18, 1927, Philadelphia
Soloist: Rachmaninoff
Conductor: Leopold Stokowski / The Philadelphia Orchestra
Dedication: Nikolai Medtner
Duration: About 25–26 minutes (1941 standard edition) / About 32 minutes (1926 original)

“Long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry.” That was Samuel Chotzinoff’s verdict in the New York World on March 19, 1927, the morning after a certain concerto’s premiere. Long. Tiresome. Unimportant. And, in patches, tawdry. The pianist absorbing the sentence in real time was the composer himself — Sergei Rachmaninoff.

He would rewrite the piece twice more. Audiences still wouldn’t listen.

Nine Years Without a Single Bar

December 1917. Rachmaninoff slipped across the Finnish border on a horse-drawn sleigh, family in tow — the kind of midnight exit you don’t plan, you just take. The Russian Revolution was two months old. Tucked in his luggage was a sheaf of sketches he’d been picking at since 1914: the bones of a fourth piano concerto. Those sketches would not see daylight for nine years.

In America, Rachmaninoff did not get to be a composer. He had to be a concert pianist, because he had a family to feed. Carnegie Hall, Boston, Chicago — he played his old works, then Chopin, then Schumann. The applause came. The money came. The new music did not.

In letters to friends he kept circling the same wound: leaving Russia had killed his desire to compose. The soil and landscape of his country were the nutrients his music ran on, and once those were cut, his pen seized. From 1917 to 1926 he lived through the longest dry spell of his life.

In the summer of 1926, at a rented house outside New York, he finally pulled out the twelve-year-old sketches. The first new work from the exiled composer in nearly a decade. Even he couldn’t take it entirely seriously — he wrote a friend a self-deprecating line about the thing feeling like Wagner’s Ring, the kind of piece you’d need several nights to get through. The 1926 original came in at just over 32 minutes. The longest concerto Rachmaninoff would ever write.

He had no idea, until March 18, 1927, that he had just walked into a disaster.

The New York Press Carpet-Bombs

March 18, 1927. Philadelphia. Rachmaninoff at the keyboard, Stokowski on the podium, the Philadelphia Orchestra behind them. Days later, the same forces moved up to Carnegie Hall and did it again. By the time the second performance ended, American critics were sharpening their knives in unison.

Samuel Chotzinoff in the New York World: “long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry.” Four adjectives, fired in sequence, the rhetorical equivalent of a beating.

Pitts Sanborn in the New York Telegram went further: “Liszt’s diluted with Tchaikovsky.” A clumsy splice job. A copy of two dead Romantics, watered down. Closer to character assassination than criticism. In a single line Sanborn negated both halves of Rachmaninoff’s identity — virtuoso heir to Liszt, last Russian Romantic in good standing — and discarded the man whole.

Around the same time, Stravinsky — Rachmaninoff’s fellow Russian exile in America — reportedly piled on. Robert Craft preserved the line decades later in his memoir of friendship with Stravinsky: Rachmaninoff had “poured too much syrup on the cake.” The barb stung worse coming from another émigré. The man who, of anyone, should have been backing Rachmaninoff up was the one with the sharpest joke in the room.

After the premiere, Rachmaninoff stopped composing again. The next new work — the Variations on a Theme of Corelli — wouldn’t appear until 1931. Four more years of silence. Nine years to break a slump, then one bad night in New York and a fresh four-year stall. The premiere of the Fourth Concerto didn’t just bruise the piece. It closed his pen for half a decade.

The “Three Blind Mice” Incident

The Largo opens with the piano singing. Plain C major, steady pulse, the tune unfolding as if Rachmaninoff is reminding everyone — including himself — that yes, he can still write a melody. And then, in 1927, a few American critics noticed something off.

The opening sounded uncomfortably close to “Three Blind Mice.” Yes, that “Three Blind Mice.” The English nursery round you bullied your sibling with. Originally a 16th-century round, by the 19th century it was baseline grade-school repertoire across the English-speaking world — a tune every six-year-old in New York or London had absorbed before they could spell it. To critics in 1927, this was the soundtrack of kindergarten. And here it was, allegedly, sitting at the heart of a major composer’s first new concerto in nine years.

Rachmaninoff had every reason to know the tune. He’d settled in New York in 1918 with his daughters Irina and Tatiana, and even before his English caught up, the songs they brought home from school and friends would have drifted through the apartment. An English nursery round is exactly the kind of thing that lodges in a composer’s ear without permission. The critics’ suspicion had a real launchpad.

In an interview with the New York Sun, Rachmaninoff publicly denied the resemblance. Bertensson’s memoir notes that for weeks afterward he couldn’t let the subject go in private either. He was furious. The melody he had most wanted to land — the one moment in the concerto where he was singing again, after nine years of muteness — had been compared to a song toddlers learn before they can read.

Listen to the two side by side. The first three notes of the Largo theme descend — mi-re-do — the same three-note descent that opens “Three Blind Mice.” The rhythm is similarly squared off. Plagiarism? That’s a different question. The descending three-note figure shows up in thousands of pieces. Beethoven uses it. Brahms uses it. Tchaikovsky uses it. It’s one of the most basic shapes in tonal music. Rachmaninoff just had bad luck. In the heads of New York’s critics in 1927, that descent had already been claimed by a song about rodents losing their tails.

📜 악보 지점: Rachmaninoff Concerto 4, II. Largo, mm. 1-16 / “Three Blind Mice” first 4 bars, side-by-side (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 4 second movement Largo Michelangeli

A Different Face Per Movement

I. Allegro vivace (alla breve)

If you came to the Fourth straight from the Second Concerto, brace yourself. There is no melody to grab onto here. Or rather: not the kind of melody you came for. A dark G-minor march pulse erupts in the orchestra, and the piano collides with it head-on. None of the bell-tolling magnetism that opens the Second. This is music that picks a fight in its first thirty seconds.

Richard Taruskin reads the rhythm here as marked by the Jazz Age. 1926 in America — two years after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. Whether or not Rachmaninoff was conscious of it, the air of the city has slipped into the score. Syncopation — off-beat snap — is studded through the first movement, and that is not something 19th-century Russian concertos do.

If you’re hearing this for the first time, listen for two moments. First, the piano’s entry within the opening 30 seconds — pure rhythm, no tune, just impact. That’s the concerto’s whole personality declared up front. Second, the cadenza-like passage in the middle of the movement, where instead of Rachmaninoff’s usual octave avalanches you get a long, jittery monodic line. That is most likely the spot American critics found “tedious” in 1927. No melody to drag you forward by the lapels.

📜 악보 지점: I. Allegro vivace, opening mm. 1-20 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

II. Largo

The shortest movement, the most tuneful, and the most beaten up. A simple C-major song-theme starts in the piano, hands off to the orchestra, comes back to the piano. A held breath between the G-minor tension of the outer movements.

This is also the movement that took the “Three Blind Mice” hit. Set the controversy aside for a moment, though: the Largo is the essence of Rachmaninoff-as-songwriter. Not simple — designed to sound simple, which is much harder. After nine years of silence, the first thing he wanted to verify, for himself, was whether he could still sing. The Largo is him checking.

The minute to listen for is the very first one. After the piano lays down the theme, the orchestra picks it up and reshapes it, and a passage emerges where the clarinets and bassoons sit underneath the piano like a cushion of low light. It sounds like a man proving something to himself.

III. Allegro vivace

The ending depends on which version you’re hearing. The 1926 original has a coda that goes on, and on, and on. By 1941, roughly 100 bars of that coda are gone. Rachmaninoff wrote to his publisher in plain English: “I have shortened it considerably… I think it is now better.”

That sentence does a lot of work. The composer cut the ending of his own piece — twice. “Better” carries more resignation than confidence. The 1941 Rachmaninoff, two years from death, is embarrassed by the 1926 Rachmaninoff, the one who had just broken nine years of silence and overshot.

The last two minutes are where to focus. The 1941 version pivots from G minor to G major and lands hard, short. The piano’s octave run rises once and drops directly into the final chord. In the 1926 version, that same arrival point is approached through nearly a hundred extra bars, with one more harmonic detour before docking. Same destination, different route.

📜 악보 지점: III. Allegro vivace, coda — 1926 vs 1941 comparison (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

🎬 유튜브에서 찾기: Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto 4 Sudbin 1926 original version third movement

Effectively Three Different Concertos

The Fourth Concerto isn’t one piece. It’s three. 1926 original, 1928 first revision, 1941 second revision. Different bar counts. Different harmonic trajectories. Different endings. Calling them “versions of the same work” is technically correct and practically misleading. From a listener’s perspective, treat them as three different concertos that happen to share a name.

1926 original — about 32 minutes. The longest, the rawest, the biggest. The longest concerto Rachmaninoff ever wrote. Howard Shelley first put it on disc in 1990; in the 21st century, Yevgeny Sudbin recorded it again. Those two recordings are effectively your only window into 1926.

1928 first revision — roughly 78 bars cut. Rachmaninoff’s hasty patch job in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. The least-known of the three. Performers don’t touch it. Treat it as functionally lost.

1941 final version — about 25–26 minutes. Another 100 bars gone. This is the version Rachmaninoff himself recorded for RCA with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Almost every modern performance uses this score.

Between 1926 and 1941, the most decisive cut is in the third-movement coda. The 1926 coda lets the G-minor momentum dissipate, then re-gathers it, then sends the piano on an extended octave detour before finally locking onto the G-major arrival. The 1941 version pulls that detour out entirely and goes from the dissipation directly to the final G-major chord. Harmonically, an extra glance back at the material has been deleted; structurally, the ending is now telegraphic. If 1926’s coda is a long full stop, 1941’s is a short stab.

The same composer cut his own ending twice over fourteen years. That isn’t common. Usually a piece gets published and the composer moves on. Rachmaninoff published, was embarrassed, cut, was still embarrassed, cut again.

If You’re Hearing It for the First Time

Going from the Second Concerto to the Fourth has a 90% chance of disappointing you. The Fourth doesn’t grab you by the collar with a melody in bar one. The first movement is dark, and frankly a little ugly in spots. The first minute does not deliver the “ah, vintage Rachmaninoff” reassurance.

But change the framing — listen to it as music written not by “Rachmaninoff the successful master” but by “an exile who hadn’t composed in nine years and was trying to start again” — and the same piece reorganizes itself. The first movement’s roughness, the second movement’s plain song, the third movement’s truncated ending — these are all traces of a composer second-guessing himself. The fact that he rewrote it three times is the proof.

Worth thirty minutes of your life? Honestly, once isn’t enough. Listen twice. Once with the 1941 standard version — the form Rachmaninoff finally signed off on. Then once with the 1926 original — the form he later disowned. The space between those two performances is where the Fourth’s actual identity lives.

Recordings — Biased Reviews

Michelangeli / Gracis / Philharmonia — the high point of the 1941 standard. Michelangeli’s hands are cold, exact, surgical. They scrub the usual Rachmaninoff syrup right off. Rachmaninoff with the Rachmaninoff drained out. Strangely, that suits the Fourth Concerto. The decisive passage to listen to is the opening of the Largo. Michelangeli’s restraint refuses to let the theme tip over into nursery-rhyme territory. The Fourth sounds clearer cold than warm.

Rachmaninoff / Ormandy / Philadelphia (1941, RCA) — the composer’s own recording. Listen to this as a document, not as entertainment. Once is enough. After hearing it, every other recording you put on becomes intelligible against a clear baseline: this is what Rachmaninoff thought it should be. The decisive moment is the third-movement coda. The ending he cut himself, ended by him, on tape. The final chord lands without hesitation, like a knife coming down. That is the recording’s center of gravity, audible right through the 1941 mono.

Sudbin / 1926 original (BIS) — the unedited concerto. Thirty-two minutes. The version Rachmaninoff once joked felt like Wagner’s Ring. The decisive moment is the long detour late in the third movement. If you’ve lived inside the 1941 version, the music will, at one specific point, refuse to end on schedule and take an extra lap. Hear that lap once, and the 1941 ending stops sounding short and starts sounding deliberately surgical.

Ashkenazy / Previn / Decca — safe. That is also the problem. Fine for an entry point. Ashkenazy recorded the full Rachmaninoff concerto cycle, and the Fourth here is balanced and clean. The rough edges that make the Fourth interesting, however, are sanded down.

Karajan? He never touched the Fourth. That tells you everything. The one Rachmaninoff concerto Karajan refused to conduct: the Fourth.

Listening with the Score

The Fourth rewards score-following more than the Second or Third do. The opening of the first movement, the Largo theme, and the bar-by-bar difference between the 1926 and 1941 codas are details that the ear loses track of without help. Reading along makes the cuts visible — you can see, on the page, exactly which bars Rachmaninoff was embarrassed by.

📜 악보 지점: I. opening / II. Largo theme / III. coda 1926 vs 1941 (IMSLP 링크 미등록)

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Concerto less famous than the Second and Third?

Because the premiere was a disaster. The New York press carpet-bombed it in 1927, and Rachmaninoff himself was unsatisfied enough to rewrite it twice — first in 1928, then again in 1941. That’s the opposite trajectory of the Second and Third, both of which were embraced almost immediately. When the composer never quite stopped apologizing for a piece, audiences pick up the cue.

Of the 1926, 1928, and 1941 versions, which one should I listen to?

Start with the 1941 standard edition. Almost every recording uses it, and it’s the form Rachmaninoff signed off on. After that, try the 1926 original, available on Yevgeny Sudbin’s BIS recording — it lets you hear the 32-minute concerto Rachmaninoff later cut down. The 1928 first revision is barely recorded and effectively impossible to hear in performance.

Did Rachmaninoff really plagiarize “Three Blind Mice” in the second movement?

Some American critics raised the comparison in 1927, and Rachmaninoff publicly denied it, furious. The two melodies do share a simple descending three-note opening, which is the surface resemblance. But that figure shows up in thousands of works across the tonal repertoire — it’s a near-universal building block, not a signature. The kindest reading: an unlucky coincidence, amplified by critics whose ears were primed to hear nursery rhymes.

It’s a 30-minute concerto. Is it worth sitting through?

Honestly, once isn’t enough. The first movement is dark and doesn’t seduce the way the Second does, so a lot of listeners drop out the first time. But once you know the context — that this is the first new music a composer wrote after a nine-year silence in exile — the second hearing reorganizes the piece. If you’ve listened twice and still don’t connect with it, fair enough; that’s a taste call rather than a misunderstanding.

Is Rachmaninoff’s own recording the best interpretation?

“Best” and “important” aren’t the same thing. The 1941 RCA recording with Ormandy and Philadelphia is essential — it’s basically the only way to hear how the composer himself wanted the piece to go. The mono sound makes it less appealing for everyday listening, though. If you want musical satisfaction more than documentary value, Michelangeli is the better pick.