Background
Rachmaninoff composed the Symphonic Dances four years after his Third Symphony, mostly at the Honeyman estate, "Orchard Point", in Centerport, New York, overlooking Long Island Sound. Its original name was Fantastic Dances, with movement titles of "Noon", "Twilight", and "Midnight". [3] While the composer had written to conductor Eugene Ormandy in late August 1940 that the piece was finished and needed only to be orchestrated, the manuscript for the full score bears completion dates of September and October 1940. [3] It was premiered by Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra, to whom it is dedicated, on January 3, 1941. [4]
The work is fully representative of the composer's later style with its curious, shifting harmonies, the almost Prokofiev-like grotesquerie of the outer movements and the focus on individual instrumental tone colors throughout (highlighted by his use of an alto saxophone in the opening dance). [2] The opening three-note motif, introduced quietly but soon reinforced by heavily staccato chords and responsible for much of the movement's rhythmic vitality, is reminiscent of the Queen of Shemakha's theme in Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Golden Cockerel , [5] the only music by another composer that he had taken out of Russia with him in 1917.
The Symphonic Dances combine energetic rhythmic sections, reminiscent of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring , with some of the composer's lushest harmonies. The rhythmic vivacity, a characteristic of Rachmaninoff's late style, may have been further heightened here for two reasons. First, he had been encouraged by the success of his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini as a ballet in 1939 and wanted to write something with which to follow it up. [3] Second, he may have included material intended for a ballet titled The Scythians, begun in 1914–15 but abandoned before he left Russia. [5] While no manuscript for the ballet is known to have survived, this does not make his quoting the work inconceivable, given Rachmaninoff's remarkable memory. He could remember and play back accurately pieces he had heard years earlier, even those he had heard only once. [6]
The work is remarkable for its use of the alto saxophone as a solo instrument. Rachmaninoff was apparently advised as to its use by the American orchestrator and composer Robert Russell Bennett. The composition includes several quotations from Rachmaninoff's other works, and can be regarded as a summing-up of his entire career as a composer. The first dance ends with a modified quotation from his unfortunate First Symphony (1897), here nostalgically rendered in a major key. The ghostly second dance was called "dusk" in some sketches. The final dance is a kind of struggle between the Dies Irae theme, representing Death, and a quotation from the ninth movement of his All-night Vigil (1915), representing Resurrection (the lyrics of the All-night Vigil's ninth movement in fact narrate mourners' discovery of Christ's empty grave and the Risen Lord). The Resurrection theme proves victorious in the end (he wrote the word "Hallelujah" at this place in the score).
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