Sergey Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Vocalise, Op. 34, No. 14 (1912/1915), arranged for cello and piano
Nikolai Lugansky, piano
Gautier Capuçon, cello
September 2020
Moscow Philharmonic Society
“… This was accompanied by a type of auditory hallucination that tormented me for months on end, day and night, even while I was asleep. I started to hear a recurrent musical phrase a few bars long, violently rhythmical and rising in pitch. It was based on a chord of a diminished seventh. In the cold light of day I tried to work out what it meant, even though the torment was permanent, even telling myself that such a phenomenon might be of interest to medical science. But try telling doctors about chords of a diminished seventh! Sometimes I would lie awake all night trying to work out what I was hearing - I wasn’t hearing it, but just thought I was - or to work out its pitch. I was forever trying to identify the notes and these primitive harmonies and to correct them, as it was the most frightful nonsense - ta raaa ra riii ri rii - going through my head in every conceivable key. I finally realized that it was a kind of variant of a relatively modest work built on rudimentary harmonic steps and one, oddly enough, that had had a great effect on me as a child: it was Rachmaninov’s Vocalise. It was this that had been the unconscious model of some of my own early compositions. “
Sviatoslav Richter, Notebooks and Conversations