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Lead book review

Haunted by Old Russia: Rachmaninoff’s lonely final years

Exiled from Russia and often denigrated in America, Rachmaninoff lived in a fug of unbearable, impenetrable sadness, says Paul Kildea

27 May 2023

9:00 AM

27 May 2023

9:00 AM

Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff in Exile Fiona Maddocks

Faber, pp.304, 25

Ask a roomful of concert pianists to pick their graveyard moment in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909) and they’ll almost certainly point to five or so pages halfway through the last movement where an ant nest of piano notes infests a sparse orchestral threnody. When an elderly Vladimir Horowitz performed this passage – lank, dyed pageboy hair framing his Bela Lugosi face, hands darting over and under each other like butterflies – he looked more like a weaver at his loom than a virtuoso at his instrument.

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