Suite in D minor (Rachmaninoff)

Suite in D minor is an orchestral suite in four movements completed by Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff in 1891. It was considered lost until the manuscript was found in 2002, leading to the discovery that a previously-unattributed composition for piano is a reduction for solo piano of this Suite.

Background

Composition

It is in four movements: Lento. Allegro moderato in D minor, Lento in B minor, Menuetto in F-sharp major, and Allegro in D major.

References

External link

(in Russian) Senar.ru/letters - Rachmaninoff's correspondence with Natalia Skalon

Category:Compositions by Sergei Rachmaninoff Category:1891 works

---damper === The mechanism for each note, except in the top two octaves, includes a damper, which is a pad that prevents the note's strings from vibrating. Normally, the damper is raised off the strings whenever the key for that note is pressed. But when the damper pedal is depressed, all the dampers on the piano are lifted at once, so that all the strings in the instrument are free from contact with dampers. This serves two purposes. Firstly, it assists the pianist in producing a legato (playing smoothly connected notes) in passages where there is no fingering that will enable legato. Secondly, raising the dampers leaves all the strings free to vibrate sympathetically with whichever notes are being played, which greatly alters the piano's tone.

Sensitive pedaling is one of the techniques a pianist must master, since piano music from Chopin onwards tends to benefit from extensive use of the sustain pedal, both as a means of achieving a singing tone and as an aid to legato. In contrast, the sustain pedal was used only sparingly by the composers of the 18th century, including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven in his early works; in that era, pedalling was considered primarily as a special coloristic effect.

--- soft === Soft pedals on some pianos are designed to lock in place, sustaining the effect without the musician applying constant pressure to the pedal. On a grand piano, this pedal shifts the whole action including the keyboard slightly to the right, so that hammers that normally strike all three of the strings for a note strike only two of them. This softens the note and modifies its tone quality. For notation of the soft pedal in printed music, see List of musical terminology.

The soft pedal was invented by Cristofori and appeared on the very earliest pianos. In the 18th and early 19th centuries, the soft pedal was more effective than today, since pianos were manufactured with only two strings per note, and just one string per note would therefore be struck. This is the origin of the name "una corda", Italian for "one string". In modern pianos, there are three strings per note (except for lower notes, which have two, and the very lowest, which have only one). The strings are spaced too closely to permit a true "una corda" effect — if shifted far enough to strike just one string on one note, the hammers would hit the string of the next note.

On many upright pianos, the soft pedal instead operates a mechanism that moves the hammers' resting position closer to the strings. Since the hammers have less distance to travel this reduces the speed at which they hit the strings, and hence the volume is reduced, but this does not change tone quality in the way the "una corda" pedal does on a grand piano. When this pedal is depressed on the vertical piano, it changes the action creating what is called "lost motion": that is, the jack is now further from the hammer butt, and now has to travel further to engage the hammer. This lost motion changes the touch and feel of the playing action, and as a result many pianists never use the soft pedal on a vertical piano. Some of the best old vertical pianos in the early 20th century used what is called a "lost motion compensator", a mechanism that would remove the lost motion when the soft pedal was depressed. Since the grand piano soft pedal simply shifts the action sideways, it does not change the touch and feel of the action, another advantage grand pianos have over vertical pianos.

Digital pianos often use this leftmost pedal to alter the sound to that of another instrument such as the organ, guitar, or harmonica. Pitch bends, Leslie speaker on and off, vibrato modulation, etc.

--- middle ===

The sostenuto pedal was the last of the three pedals to be added to the standard piano, and to this day its exact function and mechanism are not standardized. In upright pianos, especially, it is nearly impossible to implement. Thus some upright pianos don't have a sostenuto pedal (the middle pedal activating a sordino instead), while in others its effect is 'simulated' by the "Bass sustain pedal" (see below).

Due to this lack of standard, use of the sostenuto pedal by composers has not been as extensive and as specific as other techniques. But the pedal is exploited often. Among the earliest works that call for it is Bela Bartok's Allegro barbaro (1911). A later use in a major work is Olivier Messiaen's Catalogue d'oiseaux.