Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul by Valeria Z. Nollan (review)

Reviewed by: Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul by Valeria Z. Nollan David Gilbert Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul. By Valeria Z. Nollan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. [xi, 386 p. ISBN 9781666917598 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9781666917604 (ebook), $50.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, index. Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul. By Valeria Z. Nollan. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2022. [xi, 386 p. ISBN 9781666917598 (hardcover), $125; ISBN 9781666917604 (ebook), $50.] Illustrations, discography, bibliography, index. Substantive writing about Sergei Rachmaninoff in English is always welcome. The composer and his music have been popular in the United States since his first tour here in 1909–10, and it remains so today. Orchestras perform the Symphonic Dances and Ostrov mertvykh (Isle of the Dead) with some frequency, but unfortunately audiences are repeatedly served the Second Piano Concerto and pianists still pound away at the Prelude in C-sharp Minor to the exclusion of his other works. During his lifetime, this frustrated Rachmaninoff himself. Speaking of the prelude to the San Francisco Chronicle in 1937 he said, "I'm not sorry I wrote it. It has helped me. But people ALWAYS make me play it" (Sergei Bertensson and Jay Leyda, Sergei Rachmaninoff: A Lifetime in Music [New York: New York University Press, 1956; reprint, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001], 327). Further, Rachmaninoff's many songs and his few but substantial choral works would be of interest to audiences if they were exposed to them, as the author of this volume under review points out. The composer's musical language involved more complexity than these commonly performed works demonstrate, and while he extended the tonal and melodic traditions of the nineteenth century almost to the breaking point, he also showed that they were not exhausted, just as composers who came after him and live into the present day have been able to do. Rachmaninoff's music sounds easily accessible to our ears (overly exercised and tired out by the ubiquitous presence of music in almost every public space), but for someone who listens there is more below the surface than many perceive. (See, for example, recent articles by Blair Johnston on modality and tonality in Rachmaninoff's music: "Modal Idioms and Their Rhetorical Associations in Rachmaninoff's Works," Music Theory Online 20, no. 4 [December 2014], https://mtosmt.org/issues/mto.14.20.4/mto.14.20.4.johnston.html [accessed 28 February 2023] and "Off-Tonic Culmination in Rachmaninoff's Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini," Music Analysis 33, no. 3 [October 2014]: 291–340.) The specialty of Valeria Z. Nollan, author of Sergei Rachmaninoff: Cross Rhythms of the Soul, is Russian studies. Professor emeritus from Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee, her undated profile on academia.edu at https://valerianollan.academia.edu (accessed 28 February 2023) lists her research interests as "Russian literature and religious philosophy: late 19th and 20th centuries, Critical Theory, [End Page 149] Russian music of the Romantic period, Film and Media Studies, Russian Orthodoxy." She has published numerous articles, reviews, and translations and contributed political commentary and criticism to websites such as Russian Faith at https://russian-faith.com/authors/valeria-z-nollan and Russian Insider at https://russia-insider.com/en/valeria-z-nollan (both accessed 28 February 2023). She is also a serious pianist and demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of music. Some of her terminology is not necessarily what a musicologist or theorist might use; for example, "master score," which seems to mean the composer's original manuscript. She also can employ some terms that for nonacademic readers might require more concrete definition than provided: "meta-position" and "meta-authorial" (pp. 187–88). Nevertheless, points made in her discussions of Rachmaninoff's music are fully justified and always insightful. This book is a life of the composer and includes descriptive analysis of some of Rachmaninoff's works, but it is not a "life and works." The most extensive English language book of that genre is probably Barrie Martyn's Rachmaninoff: Composer, Pianist, Conductor (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2000). Nollan's book is structured in a modified chronological order, the chapters focusing on various aspects of the composer's life and character, such as "Birth of...

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