Denver Symphony Demonstrates Richness of 19th-Century Music

HJL

April 19, 1969

...The second piece — and surely the best received — was the well known Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto in C minor, with University of Wyoming faculty member Paul Lyddon as soloist. For many years after the concerto's first performance in 1901 it was rumored, falsely, that the piece was written while its composer was under a hypnotic spell, but the facts which dispelled that particular myth turn out to be equally odd.

In his memoirs Rachmaninoff reveals that prior to writing the concerto he had undergone a long period of creative sloth in which he could get nothing done. He thereupon hired a Dr. N. Dahl (to whom the concerto is dedicated) in hopes of finding a cure for his apathy. The good doctor, a practioner of autosuggestion, had Rachmaninoff lie in his office for hours at a time while he repeated over and over Dahl's words: "You will begin to write your Concerto. ..You will work with great facility.." Strangely enough, this procedure actually worked. Rachmaninoff himself reports that, "Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me...new musical ideas began to stir within me — far more than I needed for my Concerto."

Such are the strange origins of fine art; but there was nothing strange and much that was fine about the performance of the concerto by the orchestra and Mr. Lyddon. Except for some few uncertainties in tempo, this very lyrical work with its elegaic melodies that rise and fall was splendidly played by soloist and orchestra alike. It is a concerto which depends for its success on the close and complementary relationship between piano and orchestra; Mr. Lyddon's great musical gift was never more apparent than when he played with taste and restraint those passages in which the soloist accompanies the orchestra. He has, in Virgil Thomson's phrase, the ability to "move about with grace among the passions." We are surely fortunate to have him here in Laramie and at the University...