How Does Rachmaninoff Write a Melody? 🎵

[fredviner]

How does Rachmaninoff write a melody? 🎵

Check out my latest video in which I wade through the many sumptuous passages of his famous 2nd Piano Concerto discussing motifs, phrase structure and more than a few surprising connections…

[lelle]

Cool video. I think you could make a longer and more in-depth video and people would watch it.

[pianophile]

Tried to delete my "Hallmark" comment, but it only allows an edit; anyway didn't mean to make a nasty quip (likening Rachmaninov to Hallmark), but please see my discussion of this music's use in "Brief Encounter." I believe it's helpful to know something about the story and why David Lean may have chosen this particular music for it, which reflects in a not-terribly-flattering way on the music. It's of course open to discussion, but the movie very clearly portrays a kind of shallowness that many rightly or wrongly associate with Rachmaninov.

[pianophile]

I just watched that clip from "Brief Encounter" in your video, with Leslie Howard. The film is about a schmaltzy puppy-love non-romance between two utterly boring and shallow, uninteresting people, in dull marriages matching their personalities. I believe the music suited the story precisely because it matches their emotional and inner lives when they discover this spark of passion within a life utterly devoid of anything resembling passion. It turns out what they feel for each other is pure illusion, the rebellion of stifled and arrested emotions against their own self-accepted humdrum passionless conformity and ordinariness.  People like that have very limited horizons in every respect, including their sense of love or passion. So the music David Lean uses to convey this inner experience is Rachmaninovian sentimentality. If you look at the "love story," it's very clearly a very silly flirtation between two goofy and shallow people. The music was chosen to match them.

[lelle]

^You don't like Rachmaninoff much, do you? How come?