Cello Sonata (Rachmaninoff)
Encyclopedia
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Rachmaninoff
Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. Rachmaninoff is widely considered one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, one of the last great representatives of Romanticism in Russian classical music...

's Cello Sonata in G minor, Op
Opus number
An Opus number , pl. opera and opuses, abbreviated, sing. Op. and pl. Opp. refers to a number generally assigned by composers to an individual composition or set of compositions on publication, to help identify their works...

. 19, a sonata
Sonata
Sonata , in music, literally means a piece played as opposed to a cantata , a piece sung. The term, being vague, naturally evolved through the history of music, designating a variety of forms prior to the Classical era...

 for cello
Cello
The cello is a bowed string instrument with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is a member of the violin family of musical instruments, which also includes the violin, viola, and double bass. Old forms of the instrument in the Baroque era are baryton and viol .A person who plays a cello is...

 and piano
Piano
The piano is a musical instrument played by means of a keyboard. It is one of the most popular instruments in the world. Widely used in classical and jazz music for solo performances, ensemble use, chamber music and accompaniment, the piano is also very popular as an aid to composing and rehearsal...

, was completed in November 1901 and published a year later. As typical of sonatas in the Romantic period
Romantic music
Romantic music or music in the Romantic Period is a musicological and artistic term referring to a particular period, theory, compositional practice, and canon in Western music history, from 1810 to 1900....

, it has four movements
Movement (music)
A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession...

. Rachmaninoff disliked calling it a cello sonata
Cello sonata
A cello sonata is usually a sonata written for cello and piano, though other instrumentations are used, such as solo cello. The most famous Romantic-era cellos sonatas are those written by Johannes Brahms and Ludwig van Beethoven...

 because he thought the two instruments were equal. Because of this, it is often referred to as Sonata in G Minor for Cello and Piano. Most of the themes are introduced by the piano, while they are embellished and expanded in the cello's part.

He dedicated it to Anatoliy Brandukov
Anatoliy Brandukov
Anatoliy Andreyevich Brandukov was a Russian cellist who premiered many cello pieces of prominent composers including Pyotr Tchaikovsky and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Born as Russian classical music was flourishing in the middle of the 19th century, he worked with many of the important composers and...

, who gave the first performance in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

 with the composer at the piano, on 2 December 1901. Rachmaninoff seems to have made some last-minute alterations after the premiere, as he wrote the date "12 December 1901" on the score.

Background

The sonata was overshadowed by the huge success of his second piano concerto
Piano Concerto No. 2 (Rachmaninoff)
The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, is a concerto for piano and orchestra composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff between the autumn of 1900 and April 1901. The second and third movements were first performed with the composer as soloist on 2 December 1900...

, which premiere
Premiere
A premiere is generally "a first performance". This can refer to plays, films, television programs, operas, symphonies, ballets and so on. Premieres for theatrical, musical and other cultural presentations can become extravagant affairs, attracting large numbers of socialites and much media...

d on 27 October 1901.

Composition

  1. Lento – Allegro moderato (G minor)
  2. Allegro scherzando (C minor)
  3. Andante (E flat major)
  4. Allegro mosso (G major)


The work takes approximately 30 minutes to perform.

Arrangements

Arcadi Volodos
Arcadi Volodos
Arcadi Volodos is a Russian pianist. His first name is sometimes transliterated Arcady or Arkady. Volodos is renowned both for his technical mastery of the instrument's virtuosic repertoire and for his notoriously technically difficult arrangements of...

 transcribed
Transcription (music)
In music, transcription can mean notating a piece or a sound which was previously unnotated, as, for example, an improvised jazz solo. Further examples include ethnomusicological notation of oral traditions of folk music, such as Béla Bartók's and Ralph Vaughan Williams' collections of the national...

the Andante of this work for piano solo. Volodos also recorded this transcription.
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