Concert Program: February 2026 A
Russian richness, struggle, and trauma (and recovery?)
There are some classics that not even I am immune to. I tend to roll my eyes at the Chopin concertos, the Tchaikovsky concertos (and frankly his symphonies, too, but I’m coming back around to them), the Mendelssohn, and some other works that are just constantly performed and feel to me like riding solely on being pretty. I tend to be more unforgiving with concertos, which can feel more overtly performative and flashy than a symphony.
But this one is undeniably just wonderful.
What else need be said about the Rachmaninoff Cm concerto? It’s rich and Romantic and beefy and masculine and delicate and lyrical and wonderful.
But what about Rachmaninoff’s junior fellow Russian Nikolai Myaskovsky, only eight years younger? He’s got some concertos (for cello, for violin, for piano) but also 27 symphonies, in addition to many string quartets and piano sonatas, really a fascinating output.
He tends much more toward Shostakovich than Tchaikovsky, especially in his earlier works (with which I am more familiar), but what a magnificent, wonderfully crafted symphony his sixth is. It’s obviously not for everyone, nor for every occasion, but with some broad-stroke hashtags that indicate it’s a very large, heavy, serious, well-constructed work with a chorus in the finale, you sort of have an idea of what you’re in for, and I’ll say confidently that it’s one of the most magnificent, heavy, moving, epic symphonies ever written.
And we’ll get to my having written about Myaskovsky and inexplicably being one of the top Google results for his early symphonies, but suffice it to say for now that he’s sorely neglected and this is probably by a long shot his most famous work. He definitely has shorter, less expansive pieces, even just in his symphonic output, but what better place to start?
An interesting, compelling thread of tragedy, trauma, and (in one case potential) triumph revealed itself in this program, and I was pleased to see that besides some distant C minor/E-flat major/minor relation and their shared musical lineage, there is a rather moving thematic element to both of these pieces that I hope you’ll take the time to discover and think on.
I do like the straight contrast that a two-piece program affords: one concerto, one symphony, and similar to our Mozart/Mahler pairing, we’ll be seeing a lot of Beethoven/Shostakovich this way in programs to come. For better or worse, Beethoven’s first piano concerto was already accounted for in our very first monthly program in September of last year, but we’ve still got his other four, and actually, wouldn’t it be cool to throw in the choral fantasy for another LvB/Shosty pairing? All the Beethoven symphonies are spoken for, too, at this point. We’ve already done 3 and 5, and the only one I might not have already accounted for in a program by now is the eighth, but there is a tentative idea planned for that one, too, and it doesn’t involve a Shostakovich piano concerto, but it does involve the only five-movement piano concerto with a male chorus. Wink wink.
But we’ll Beethoven that bridge when we get to it. For now, enjoy Rachmaninoff and Myaskovsky. It’s a long second half, but trust me, it’s worth it.