This sparer style, first apparent in the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, enhances the emotional power of the work.
[3] Also like Rachmaninoff's motto themes — and thus differing from Tchaikovsky's — it is short and, by tending to assume various shapes, is easily workable for further symphonic development.
He arrived at his newly built Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland in late April 1935 with the prospect of writing a symphony in mind.
Five days before leaving Senar at the end of his summer holiday, Rachmaninov wrote to Satina with some dissatisfaction, "I have finished two-thirds in clean form but the last third of the work in rough.
He evidently took the score of the symphony with him when he left, since he had it with him in Paris in February 1936 for Julius Conus to mark bowings in the string parts.
The symphony is scored for full orchestra with 3 flutes (the 3rd doubling piccolo), 3 oboes (the 3rd doubling cor anglais), 2 clarinets in A and B♭, bass clarinet in A and B♭, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 2 trumpets in A and B♭, 1 contralto trumpet in F, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, bass drum, snare drum, triangle, tambourine, tam-tam, xylophone, 2 harps (or harp and small upright piano), celesta, and strings.
The day after the Third Symphony premiered, Edwin Schloss wrote for The Philadelphia Record that he found the work "a disappointment," with "echoes ... of the composer's lyric spaciousness of style" but largely sterile.
"[9] W. J. Henderson of the Sun was perhaps most accurate in summing up both the work and the situation the critics faced in assessing it: It is the creation of a genial mind laboring in a field well known and loved by it, but not seeking now to raise the fruit of heroic proportions....
The cantabile theme of the first movement is especially attractive in its lyric and plaintive character and the leading subject has virility and possibilities which are not neglected later.
In fact, we suspect, after this insufficient first hearing, that there is more organic unity in this symphony through consanguinity of themes than is instantly discernable.
Listeners who enjoyed the Second and Third Concertos, the Second Symphony, Isle of the Dead and, more recently, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, came expecting a quite different work than the one they heard.
As Barrie Martyn phrases it, "The public had doubtless been misled by the old-style romanticism of the eighteenth Paganini variation and were perplexed to find that Rachmaninoff had after all advanced beyond the 1900s; the critics, on the other hand, condemned him just because they felt that he had not.