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Having painfully left Russia a few months after the outbreak of the 1917 Revolution, Sergei Rachmaninov rebuilt his life in the United States, where he had already become known on tour in 1910. For the next 25 years he suffered acutely from the separation from his homeland, and that burden affected his resolve to go on composing. Only seven of the 45 works in his official catalogue date from the American period. Among them the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini for piano and orchestra (1934) shines with a special light, a rare case in which extreme virtuosity coexists with formal rigour, and the taste of the public with that of the critics. But more than a homage to Paganini, the Rhapsody is a great monument in honour of Liszt, who a century earlier had worked on the very same Paganini caprice in his Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini.
Hans Rott

«It is impossible to estimate what music has lost in him. His First Symphony reaches such heights of genius as to make him — without exaggeration — the founder of the New Symphony». So spoke Gustav Mahler of Hans Rott, a misunderstood genius who died at just 26 in 1884. With this masterpiece, a solitary, monumental stone where Wagner’s world meets Brahms’s, Rott hoped to be accepted into Viennese cultural life. But it was Brahms’s negative verdict, as head of the panel for an important government scholarship, that destroyed the young composer’s hopes; he ended his life in a psychiatric clinic. The symphony waited more than a century to see the light: its first performance, in 1989, immediately revealed the unsuspected existence of another giant in the history of music.
Orchestra of Teatro Comunale di Bologna