Rachmaninov finished the Symphonic Dances in 1940, working with unusual speed for a composer who had spent most of his American exile in near-creative paralysis. He was sixty-seven, in fragile health, and he knew it. The work quotes his own First Symphony — a piece so savaged at its 1897 premiere that he’d nearly stopped composing altogether — and it closes with a Dies irae that he’d been threading through his music since the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. He called it his last creative spark. You can hear the valediction in every bar, and any director who doesn’t feel that weight has no business on the podium.
Andrew Litton feels it. That much is clear from the opening minutes of this Bergen Philharmonic recording, where the first dance announces itself with genuine mass and rhythmic snap — the orchestra sounds large, the recorded acoustic generous without blurring. There’s real textural transparency too, which matters in a score so obsessively detailed that Rachmaninov himself supervised the orchestration with almost neurotic care.
The saxophone solo in the first movement — one of the loneliest, most achingly radiant solos in the orchestral literature — is handled with real sensitivity here. Wistful is exactly the word, and when the strings eventually carry the melody forward, Litton holds them back at first, letting the music breathe before the inevitable surge. It’s the right instinct.
One reservation, though. Those two hammered punctuation chords that Rachmaninov plants like exclamation points at several junctures in the first movement — Litton lingers on them, draws them out, makes a rhetorical event of what should hit with sudden, almost brutal finality. It’s a small thing, but it chips away at the music’s structural logic. The gestures should surprise, not announce themselves.
The slow movement — that strange, moonlit waltz that seems to drift in from some ruined ballroom — goes well. The Bergen strings have a genuine quality of muted, inward grief here, and the contrabassoon’s sustained low note anchoring the spooky transition back to the allegro is one of those moments where you hear what a magnificent low-end the orchestra carries. Vasily Petrenko and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic — my current first choice in this work — make that note register too, though in Bergen it seems to emerge from slightly deeper in the earth.
The Isle of the Dead is the tougher sell. Rachmaninov wrote it after seeing a black-and-white reproduction of Böcklin’s painting, and he always regretted never having seen the color original — the greens, he felt, would have changed everything. The music’s 5/8 pulse is the slow pull of oars across still water, and the middle climax needs to feel genuinely catastrophic, like something rising from below the surface. Litton builds it patiently and the Bergen players sustain the long swell with real control, though I’ve heard the unleashing feel more inevitable — Previn’s old LSO recording comes to mind, where the climax seemed to announce itself from the first bar.
The Rock, the early tone poem, is youthful Rachmaninov — still hearing Tchaikovsky in every corner, not yet fully himself, though the orchestral writing already shows that instinctive understanding of how to make a large ensemble sing rather than merely play. Litton treats it with appropriate affection without inflating it into something it isn’t. Sensible.
The BIS disc is distinguished — warm, spacious, and honest about the orchestra’s actual size. No artificial enhancement, no scooped-up bass to simulate grandeur the players haven’t earned.
This is a fine disc. Not the one I’d hand a newcomer — Petrenko remains the first recommendation for the Symphonic Dances — but Litton and Bergen are serious, attentive musicians doing serious, attentive work, and that’s rarer than it should be.
