Rachmaninoff: Inside Out

The spirit of Russia permeated everything Rachmaninoff wrote, even after his final exile to America.

There, in 1940, the composer wrote his last orchestral score, theSymphonic Dances. A strange sense of foreboding pervades these compelling orchestral choreographies, but there's optimism, too. In the last dance, against a baleful quotation from the death-themed plainchant 'Dies Irae', Rachmaninoff quotes the striving 'Alleluia' from his own All-Night Vigil.

Rachmaninoff wasn't about to let the forces of death win through, but he appears a long way here from the 17-year-old student who in a period of total inspiration one summer wrote a dashing, impassioned First Piano Concerto while full of the joys of youth.