Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3 - Balakirev: Russia London Symphony Orchestra & Valery Gergiev

• Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 - 1943): Symphony No. 3 in A Major, Op. 44:
• 1 I. Lento - Allegro moderato - Allegro 17:45
• 2 II. Adagio ma non troppo - Allegro vivace 11:52
• 3 III. Allego - Allegro vivace - Allegro (Tempo primo) - Allegretto - Allegro vivace 13:47
• Mily Balakirev (1837 - 1910):
• 4 Russia 13:04
• Total Runtime 56:28

Info for Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3 - Balakirev: Russia

Following his acclaimed LSO Live recordings of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No 2 and 'Symphonic Dances', Valery Gergiev conducts a scintillating performance of the powerfully emotional Symphony No 3, framed with a work by one of the Mighty Five: Balakirev’s 'Russia'. Rachmaninov’s third and final symphony was composed nearly 20 years after the composer’s emigration from his homeland. Often considered to be his most overtly Russian symphony, Rachmaninov makes subtle use of a motto theme which appears throughout the work and can be heard in the finale as a variant of the Dies Irae plainchant – a melodic tag used in Rachmaninov’s music as a dark reminder of mortality.

"Russia", an epic symphonic poem, is a reworking of an Overture on Russian Themes, collected during Balakirev’s expedition up through the Volga. It was composed in 1864 and is based on three folksongs – a slow wedding song and two round-dances which are varied, fragmented and combined throughout the piece. Gergiev's Rachmaninov cycle is due for completition in Spring 2016.

"Gergiev and the LSO capture the score's expressive beauty, and also the sense of its transience as chill winter encroaches." (BBC Music Magazine)

"Gergiev's view is dark and stormy, his relatively slow pacing undercut by so many lugubrious inflections that the piece loses its overall shape." (Gramophone Magazine)

"The band is on its best form, the playing imbued with affection and nostalgia as well as verve and drive." (Sunday Times)

"Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 44 premiered in Philadelphia under Leopold Stokowski, took many years to click with audiences, but this profoundly Russian reading by Valery Gergiev, recorded live with the London Symphony Orchestra in 2014, may put the capstone on a long reevaluation. The work is essentially conventional in form, with a sonata-form opening movement, a middle movement that doubles as slow movement and scherzo, and a dance-flavored finale. It's not really in the Romantic vein of Rachmaninov's earlier music, though, with an economical mode of expression and the Russian quality deployed in the service of a reflective mood. It's interesting to compare this recording with Gergiev's live outings at the head of the Mariinsky Orchestra in St. Petersburg, for both have their advantages. Here, Gergiev gets great clarity and elegance out of the LSO's low brasses and winds, and the engineers from the orchestra's own LSO Live label are with him every step of the way. He catches the restrained quality of the music. A bonus is the presence of Balakirev's rarely played Russia, a collection of strung-together Russian tunes in which Gergiev delivers a totally infectious quality. It's a fine way of bringing down the curtain on a recommended Rachmaninov recording." (James Manheim, AMG)

London Symphony Orchestra
Valery Gergiev, conductor

London Symphony Orchestra
From its first days the London Symphony Orchestra has been defiantly different and proudly pioneering.

It was the first British orchestra owned by its players, and its fiercly independent ethos has never waned. It was one of the first orchestras to make gramophone records and film scores; today it has more recordings to its name than any other orchestra in the world. It was the first to have its own peak-time television series. And more than a century on, the revolution continues.

Now in its twelfth decade, the history of the LSO contains many of the important developments of British orchestral life, including premieres of now-popular works and relationships with some of the greatest conductors. In these pages you can find out more about the LSO and its rich history, about the works it has premiered, the famous names that have held the position of Principal Conductor, the film soundtracks it has recorded and about the archive of programmes, photographs, attendance sheets and publicity materials.

Valery Gergiev
The art of Valery Gergiev is in great demand throughout the world. The maestro is a vivid representative of the St Petersburg conducting school and a former pupil of the legendary Professor Ilya Musin. While still a student at the Leningrad Conservatoire, Gergiev won the Herbert von Karajan Competition in Berlin and the All-Union Conducting Competition in Moscow, following which he was invited to join the Kirov Theatre (now the Mariinsky) as an assistant to the principal conductor. His debut as a conductor at the theatre came on 12 January 1978 with Sergei Prokofiev's opera War and Peace. In 1988 Valery Gergiev was appointed Music Director of the Mariinsky Theatre, and in 1996 he became its Artistic and General Director (leading the orchestra and opera and ballet companies).

With the arrival of Valery Gergiev at the helm, it became a tradition to hold major thematic festivals marking various anniversaries of composers. In 1989 there was a festival marking one hundred and fifty years of Modest Musorgsky, in 1990 there was one commemorating one hundred and fifty years of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, in 1991 there was another marking one hundred years of Sergei Prokofiev and in 1994 there was another marking one hundred and fifty years of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. These festivals saw performances not only of well-known scores but also of rarely performed pieces or works that had never been staged before at all. The tradition of anniversary festivals has continued in the 21st century with a celebration of one hundred years of Dmitry Shostakovich in 2006, another marking one hundred and seventy-five years of Pyotr Tchaikovsky in 2015 and a third marking one hundred and twenty-five years of Sergei Prokofiev in 2016.

Through maestro Gergiev's efforts the Mariinsky Theatre has revived operas by Richard Wagner. In 1997 came Parsifal, which had not been performed in Russia for more than eighty years, in 1999 Lohengrin was revived and by 2003 the grandiose operatic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen had been staged in full. That was the first time following an interval of almost a century that the complete tetralogy was staged in Russia and the first production in Russia to be performed in the original German. The tetralogy has been performed on Mariinsky Theatre tours to great acclaim in Moscow as well as abroad – in the USA, South Korea, Japan, Great Britain and Spain. The theatre's repertoire also includes productions of Tristan und Isolde(2005) and Der Fliegende Holländer (1998, 2008).

The Mariinsky Orchestra under Valery Gergiev has scaled new heights, assimilating not just opera and ballet scores, but also an expansive symphony music repertoire – every symphony by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Sibelius, Prokofiev and Shostakovich and works by Berlioz, Bruckner, Rimsky-Korsakov, Richard Strauss, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Dutilleux, Ustvolskaya, Shchedrin, Kancheli and other composers.

Under the direction of Valery Gergiev the Mariinsky Theatre has become a major theatre and concert complex, without par anywhere in the world. In 2006 the Concert Hall was opened, followed in 2013 by the theatre's second stage (the Mariinsky-II). Since 1 January 2016 the Mariinsky Theatre has had a branch in Vladivostok – the Primorsky Stage, and since April 2017 it has had a branch in Vladikavkaz: the National State Opera and Ballet Theatre of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania and State Academic Philharmonic of the Republic of North Ossetia-Alania. Other projects of Valery Gergiev hosted by the Mariinsky Theatre include media broadcasting, on-line broadcasts of concerts and the establishment of a recording studio. 2009 saw the launch of the Mariinsky label, which to date has released more than thirty discs that have received great acclaim from the critics and the public throughout the world; these recordings include symphonies by Tchaikovsky and piano concerti by Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, operas by Wagner, Massenet and Donizetti and an entire plethora of other works. Recordings of Prokofiev's ballets Romeo and Juliet and Cinderellaand the opera The Gambler have been released on DVD.

Valery Gergiev's international activities are no less intensive and active. Having made debuts in 1992 at the Bayerishe Staatsoper (Musorgsky's Boris Godunov), in 1993 at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin) and in 1994 at the Metropolitan Opera (Verdi's Otello with Plácido Domingo in the title role), the maestro successfully continues to collaborate with the world's great opera houses. He works with the World Orchestra for Peace (which he has directed since 1997 following the death of the ensemble's founder Sir Georg Solti), the Philharmonic Orchestras of Berlin, Paris, Vienna, New York and Los Angeles, the Symphony Orchestras of Chicago, Cleveland, Boston and San Francisco, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra (Amsterdam) and many other ensembles. From 1995 to 2008 Valery Gergiev was Principal Conductor of the Rotterdam Philharmonic (of which he remains an honorary conductor to this day), and from 2007 to 2015 he was Principal Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Since autumn 2015 the maestro has headed the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra.

Valery Gergiev is the founder and director of prestigious international festivals including the Stars of the White Nights (since 1993), the Moscow Easter Festival (since 2002), the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam, the Mikkeli Festival and the 360 Degreesfestival in Munich. Since 2011 he has directed the organisational committee of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Valery Gergiev focuses much of his attention on working with young musicians. One of his initiatives saw the revival of the All-Russian Choral Society; this includes the Children's Chorus of Russia, which has appeared at the Mariinsky-II, the Bolshoi Theatre and at the closing ceremony of the XXII Winter Olympics in Sochi. Since 2013 the maestro has directed the National Youth Orchestra of the USA and regularly appears with the youth orchestras of the Schleswig-Holstein Festival, the Verbier Festival and the Pacific Ocean Music Festival in Sapporo. Since 2015 the Mariinsky Theatre has run the Mariinsky NEXT annual festival, which features children's and youth orchestras of St Petersburg.

Valery Gergiev's musical and public activities have brought him three State Prizes of the Russian Federation (1993, 1998 and 2015), the titles of People's Artist of the Russian Federation (1996) and Hero of Labour (2013), the Order of Alexander Nevsky (2016) and prestigious State awards of Armenia, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Poland, France and Japan.

Gergiev’s artistic achievements have brought him numerous titles and awards. These include the title of People’s Artist of Russia (1996), three State Prizes of Russia (1993, 1998 and 2015), the Order of Alexander Nevsky (2016), government awards from Germany (Cross of the First Class “For Services”), Italy (Grand’ufficiale dell’Ordine al merito), France (Ordre des Arts et des Lettres), the Netherlands (Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion), Japan (Order of the Rising Sun), the honorary title of UNESCO Artist of the World, the Swedish Royal Academy of Music’s Polar Music Prize and Europe’s Glashütte Original Music Festival Prize in 2010 for his support of talented young musicians. That same year, Gergiev was elected Dean of the Faculty of Arts of the St Petersburg State University. He also joined the Council for Culture and the Arts of the Russian President and headed the organisational committee of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. In November 2011 France’s respected Classica magazine named him “Artist of the Year”. In 2012 he was awarded the titles of Honorary Doctor of the Moscow State University and Honorary Professor of the St Petersburg Conservatoire, while one year before that the maestro became Honorary President of the Edinburgh International Festival. On 1 May 2013 Russian President Vladimir Putin awarded maestro Gergiev the first title of Hero of Labour of Russia.

Booklet for Rachmaninov: Symphony No. 3 - Balakirev: Russia