With continued lack of success, he withdrew the work, eventually revising and republishing it in 1941 (3rd version, most generally performed today).

[2] The concerto is in three movements: Rachmaninoff had already been making a more extensive use of short thematic motifs and strong rhythmic patterns in his Op.

This refinement of musical language, especially in orchestration, went back at least to The Bells and a more astringent tone was already noticeable in songs like "The Raising of Lazarus", Op.

[4] Even before the Revolution, in 1916, Russian critic Leonid Sabaneyev noticed a change in Rachmaninoff's style when the composer played eight of his nine Op.

Evidently the individuality originally formed by the composer (the culmination of which I consider to be the extraordinary Second Concerto) has for some reason ceased to satisfy the composer.The searches of a great talent are always interesting.

Had Rachmaninoff stayed in Russia, and the Bolsheviks' rise to power never taken place, the Fourth Piano Concerto probably would have been premiered around 1919, eight years earlier than its actual unveiling.

It is also possible that in the fertile creative ground of the composer's estate of Ivanovka, where many of his major pieces grew to fruition, the concerto might have become a wholly different composition, albeit probably no less adventurous than the work we know today.

What they failed to realize was that, though some aspects of the concerto had roots in Imperial Russia, the piece had been written mainly in New York, and finished in Western Europe.

The composer was a sharp, intelligent and sensitive man who had naturally been affected by the sights and sounds of the country in which he had resided for the last several years.

He may have begun this work as early as 1911: the end of the slow movement from rehearsal number 39 has in the orchestral part the same nine-bar passage as the Etude-Tableau, Op.

Although composition at that time was for the most part out of the question, sketches for the finale of the concerto are on the back of the manuscript sheets of his cadenza for Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No.

[19] Though he made a good start on the piece, he was also interrupted numerous times — not least among which being the sudden death of his son-in-law, who had married his daughter Irina less than a year previously.

Hofmann said he liked the new concerto very much, and he hoped that — while its frequent metric changes might make playing the piece with an orchestra difficult — it would not prove an obstacle to future performances.

"[22] Rachmaninoff saw two specific problems with the work: the third movement, which he found too drawn out, and the fact that the orchestra is almost never silent throughout the piece (although the latter tendency is fully in evidence in the composer's Second Concerto, as well).

Along with his having been away from the composer's desk for several years, this insecurity in deciding how his ideas should be expressed may account for what some contemporary critics considered the fractured nature of the Fourth.

They all made subsequent developments wholly integral to their compositional styles which were considered by critics as a weakening of creative power rather than as a refinement of it.

[24] In any case, Lawrence Gilman, who had written the programme notes for the concerto, complained in the Herald Tribune of "thinness and monotony" in the new work, that it was "neither so expressive nor so effective as its famous companion in C minor".

[25] Pitts Sanborn of the Telegram called the concerto "long-winded, tiresome, unimportant, in places tawdry", describing it as "an interminable, loosely knit hodge-podge of this and that, all the way from Liszt to Puccini, from Chopin to Tchaikovsky.

"[26] After stating that the work glittered "with innumerable stock trills and figurations" and the orchestration was as "rich as nougot", he called the music itself "now weepily sentimental, now of an elfin prettiness, now swelling toward bombast in a fluent orotundity.

The British premiere of the work was given on December 2, 1928 by Lev Pouishnoff in a BBC broadcast from Manchester and played several times in the UK in 1929.

[27] Pianists Vladimir Ashkenazy, Leslie Howard and Yevgeny Sudbin, and biographer Max Harrison have argued that, as with his Second Piano Sonata, Rachmaninoff got everything about the Fourth Concerto right the first time.

They find it extremely disappointing that he yielded to adverse opinion, repeatedly making changes that weakened what had initially been a powerfully original work.

[29] Though Rachmaninoff talked about revisiting the Fourth Concerto after finishing the Third Symphony, he put off going over the score until 1941, 15 years after initially completing it.

While not changing the basic thematic material, Rachmaninoff revised the orchestration, simplified the piano writing in the central Largo, and thoroughly overhauled the finale.

[31]Ormandy and Rachmaninoff played the revised Fourth, with the Second Symphony, in Washington, Baltimore, and eventually New York, as well as recording the work for RCA.

Still, Rachmaninoff was never fully satisfied with the work, continuing to tinker with the orchestration even in the days immediately before his recording session with Ormandy, and lamenting that he did not find the time to reorchestrate the piece to his satisfaction.

In 2000 the Rachmaninoff Estate authorized Boosey & Hawkes, with the expert assistance of Robert Threlfall and Leslie Howard, to publish the uncut 1926 manuscript version of the Fourth Concerto.

Rachmaninoff's changes in those works included large cuts, a number of minor textual rewritings, and a few newly composed segments to attempt cementing a fragmented structure.

Access to the manuscript of the Fourth Piano Concerto could therefore show what the composer may have initially had in mind, structurally speaking, and what he might have obfuscated in the process of revision.

The Henrietta Schumann recording comprises five sides of three 78 rpm instantaneous discs which have been transferred to CD format by the International Piano Archives at Maryland which has taken the opportunity to reduce the surface noise and correct the playback pitch, although some portions of the work are missing due to recording with only one disc cutting lathe.