Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40, is a concerto for piano and orchestra by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, completed in 1926. The work exists in three versions. Following its unsuccessful premiere (1st version), the composer made cuts and other amendments before publishing it in 1928 (2nd version). With continued lack of success, he withdrew the work, eventually revising and republishing it in 1941 (3rd version, most generally performed today). The original manuscript version was released in 2000 by the Rachmaninoff Estate to be published and recorded.Harrison, p. 257.

The work is dedicated to Nikolai Medtner, who in turn dedicated his Second Piano Concerto to Rachmaninoff the following year.

Form

Compared with its predecessors, the Fourth Concerto contains sharper thematic profiles along with a refinement of textures in keyboard and orchestra. These qualities do not lead to greater simplicity but to a different sort of complexity. It was also a continuation of Rachmaninoff's long-range creative growth: the Third Concerto and the recomposed First Concerto were less heavily orchestrated than the Second Concerto. In keeping with its general character, the Fourth Concerto is lighter still, yet more oblique.Harrison, 255–256.

The concerto is in three movements:

Rachmaninoff had already been making a more extensive use of short thematic motifs and strong rhythmic patterns in his Op. 32 Preludes, in place of what was called the "unmentionable restlessness" that made his work, especially the concertos, a distressing experience for some musicians. This refinement of musical language, especially in orchestration, went back at least to The Bells and a more astringent tone was already noticeable in songs like "The Raising of Lazarus", Op. 34, No. 6.Harrison, 256.

The orchestra consists of piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, percussion (triangle, tambourine, snare drum, bass drum, cymbals), and strings.

Influences

Modern classical music What Rachmaninoff heard around him proved that politics was not the only thing that had changed since the October Revolution. Even if he did not like most of what he heard, he was at least aware of what Bartók, Hindemith, Stravinsky, Schoenberg and Les Six were writing.Matthew-Walker, 89 Even before the Revolution, in 1916, Russian critic Leonid Sabaneyev noticed a change in Rachmaninoff's style when the composer played eight of his nine Op. 39 Études-Tableaux:

This great talent is now in a period of search. Evidently the individuality originally formed by the composer (the culmination of which I consider to be the extraordinary Second Concerto) has for some reason ceased to satisfy the composer.

The searches of a great talent are always interesting. Although personally I cannot consider Rachmaninov a musical phenomenon of the highest order … nevertheless one senses in him a tremendous inner power, a potential that some barrier prevents from emerging fully … his artistic personality contains the promise of something greater than he has yet given us.Muzykalni Sovremennok

Other critics also noticed a new angularity and pungency in these études, along with a more severe, concentrated and deepened mode of expression.Bertensson and Leyda, 201–202. This was influenced in part by Rachmaninoff's study of Scriabin's music for the memorial recitals he played in 1915;Bertensson and Leyda, 192, 195–196, this study bore further fruit in the works Rachmaninoff wrote after leaving Russia.

Had Rachmaninoff stayed in Russia, and the Bolsheviks' rise to power never taken place, the Fourth Piano Concerto probably would have been premiered around 1919, eight years earlier than its actual unveiling. It is also possible that in the fertile creative ground of the composer's estate of Ivanovka, where many of his major pieces grew to fruition, the concerto might have become a wholly different composition, albeit probably no less adventurous than the work we know today.Matthew-Walker, International Piano Quarterly.

Jazz Many have noted Rachmaninoff's inspiration from George Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, a piece for piano and orchestra completed in 1924, only three years before Rachmaninoff finished his own. Though he was unable to attend the premiere of the Gershwin Rhapsody on February 12, 1924 due to a prior recital engagement at the Ararat Temple, Kansas, Missouri that same evening, he attended other performances of Gershwin's piano and orchestra works including Concerto in F, Second Rhapsody, Variations on I Got Rhythm, and eventually Rhapsody in Blue in the 1920s and 30s. Sometimes less remembered is that he was a faithful and longtime enthusiast of Paul Whiteman's jazz orchestra, which hosted the Rhapsody in Blue premiere, even sending his daughter the Whiteman orchestra's newest records every month.Henderson, 246. He also listened to orchestral jazz by both the black jazz orchestras then playing regularly in New York — those of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington — and later became a devoted enthusiast of pianist Art Tatum. Tenor John McCormack remembered Rachmaninoff himself playing jazz for his own amusement.Matthew-Walker, 97.

These jazz elements, most felt, were not consistent with Rachmaninoff's previous brooding and dark themes. What they failed to realize was that, though some aspects of the concerto had roots in Imperial Russia, the piece had been written mainly in New York, and finished in Western Europe. The composer was a sharp, intelligent and sensitive man who had naturally been affected by the sights and sounds of the country in which he had resided for the last several years. Any romantic aura had long dissipated.Henderson, 255.

Overview The concerto is probably the least known of all Rachmaninoff's piano concertos, but it is frequently performed in Russia. There may be several reasons for this. The structure was criticized for being amorphous and difficult to grasp on a single hearing. Only the second movement (Largo) contains a prominent melody, while the external movements seem to be composed mainly of virtuosic piano runs and cadenzas. Like most of Rachmaninoff's late works, the concerto has a daring chromaticism and a distinctive jazzy quality.

Composition Rachmaninoff left Russia with his family on December 23, 1917 for a concert date in Stockholm, Sweden, never to return. Life as an émigré with a wife and two daughters to support meant that composition was out of the question, at least for a while. He also needed time to renew himself. Rachmaninoff had composed intensely during much of his career in Russia. Aside from the requirements of his pianistic career, it may have been more dignified for Rachmaninoff to endure a period of creative silence than to merely repeat what he had written before. If his subsequent compositions were to be relevant to his new situation, he needed time to learn and explore his new parameters.Harrison, 249.

In Dresden, where he had done much composing in the past, Rachmaninoff began to think specifically about composing again. He wrote his friend and fellow exile Nikolai Medtner, "I've already started to work. Am moving slowly."Bertenssohn and Leyva, 235. After eight years of touring, he took a sabbatical at the end of 1925, working on the Fourth Concerto. He may have begun this work as early as 1911: the end of the slow movement from rehearsal number 39 has in the orchestral part the same nine-bar passage as the Etude-Tableau, Op. 33/3 from bar 30. This Etude-Tableau derives from 1911 and was pulled from the advertised publication in 1914.Publishers' note to Etudes-tableaux, London:Boosey&Hawkes 1985 In fact it was not published at all during Rachmaninoff's lifetime. The April 12 issue of Muzyka points to 1914:Norris, 60. While Rachmaninoff had gone to Ivanovka earlier than usual that year, in March, he did not return to Moscow that October with a finished composition, contrary to his usual custom. All he reportedly had were three sketch books and various separate sheets of manuscript paper.Harrison, 253. The composer brought this material with him from Russia in 1917; it is now housed in the Library of Congress.Listed in Threefall and Norris, p. 127. He may have also tinkered with sketches in his early years in the United States. Although composition at that time was for the most part out of the question, sketches for the finale of the concerto are on the back of the manuscript sheets of his cadenza for Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2. These sheets are also at the Library of Congress.Harrison, 254.

Though he made a good start on the piece, he was also interrupted numerous times — not least among which being the sudden death of his son-in-law, who had married his daughter Irina less than a year previously. With this tragedy and other challenges which arose, Rachmaninoff did not finish the work until the end of the following August. On top of this, Rachmaninoff's already self-critical tendencies were heightened. He complained to Medtner on September 8 of the size of the score (110 pages) and that it "will have to be performed like The Ring: on several evenings in succession."Bertensson and Leyda, 246. Medtner replied five days later that he could not agree with Rachmaninoff about the concerto being too long, or about his general attitude about length. "Actually, your concerto amazed me by the fewness of its pages, considering its importance... Naturally, there are limitations to the lengths of musical works, just as there are dimensions for canvasses. But within these human limitations, it is not the length of musical compositions that creates an impression of boredom, but it is rather the boredom that creates the impression of length."Niels, 7–8. The pianist Josef Hofmann, another friend to whom Rachmaninoff showed the score, also encouraged him. Hofmann said he liked the new concerto very much, and he hoped that — while its frequent metric changes might make playing the piece with an orchestra difficult — it would not prove an obstacle to future performances. "It certainly deserves them from a musical as well as a pianistic point of view."Bertensson and Leyda, 248.

Rachmaninoff saw two specific problems with the work: the third movement, which he found too drawn out, and the fact that the orchestra is almost never silent throughout the piece (although the latter tendency is fully evident in the composer's Second Concerto, as well). He concluded that he would have to make cuts in the score. Rachmaninoff had made changes to works in the past, after he had heard or performed them. Along with his having been away from the composer's desk for several years, this insecurity in deciding how his ideas should be expressed may account for what some contemporary critics considered the fractured nature of the Fourth.Walker, 100.

The concerto was premiered in Philadelphia on March 18, 1927, with the composer as soloist and Leopold Stokowski leading the Philadelphia Orchestra. After a second performance on March 19, Rachmaninoff performed the work with Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra in New York on March 22. The Three Russian Songs, Op. 41, for chorus and orchestra were also given their first three performances on these same occasions; the Three Russian Songs were favourably received each time, the concerto less so.

Reception