RACHMANINOV Moment Musical Op.16 No. 4- Michel Mañanes

Michel Mañanes plays Rachmaninoff Moment Musical Moment op.16 No. 4.All this pieces are played in an "Antique Bösendorfer". Has won first prize in several young piano competitions. He is Piano Teacher in Madrid and continue to give concerts.Rachmaninov Moment Musical.Classical concert pianist. http://www.geocities.com/pianistmananes/index.html Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff[a] (Russian: Сергей Васильевич Рахманинов, Sergej Vasil'evič Rakhmaninov, 1 April 1873 [O.S. 20 March]--28 March 1943) was a Russian composer, pianist, and conductor. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. Early influences of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and other Russian composers gave way to a thoroughly personal idiom which included a pronounced lyricism, expressive breadth, structural ingenuity and a tonal palette of rich, distinctive orchestral colors.[1] Understandably, the piano figures prominently in Rachmaninoff's compositional output, either as a solo instrument or as part of an ensemble. He made it a point, however, to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody. In some of his early orchestral pieces he showed the first signs of a talent for tone painting, which he would perfect in The Isle of the Dead,[2] and he began to show a similar penchant for vocal writing in two early sets of songs, Opp. 4 and 8.[3] Rachmaninoff's masterpiece, however, is his choral symphony The Bells, in which all of his talents are fused and unified.[4] Rachmaninoff sometimes felt threatened by the success of modernists such as Scriabin and Prokofiev and wondered whether to cease composing even before he left Russia.[5] His musical philosophy was rooted in the Russian spiritual tradition, where the role of the artist was to create beauty and to speak the truth from the depths of his heart.[6] In his last major interview, in 1941, he admitted his music, like Russian music, was a product of his temperament.[7] He said, on another occasion, "The new kind of music seems to create not from the heart but from the head. Its composers think rather than feel. They have not the capacity to make their works exalt—they meditate, protest, analyze, reason, calculate and brood, but they do not exalt."[8] Presto is in ternary form with a coda. The piece begins with a fortissimo introduction with a thick texture in the left hand consisting of chromatic sextuplets. The melody is a "rising quasi-military" idea, interspersed between replications of the left hand figure,[6] the mostly two-note melody being a strong unifying element.[1] The middle section is a brief period of pianississimo falling figures in the right hand and rising scales in the left. The third section is marked Più vivo (more life) and is played even faster than the intro, 112 quarter notes per minute.[14] At this point the piece develops a very thick texture, with the original left hand figure played in both hands in varying registers. The technique of rapidly change the octave in which a melody is played, sometimes called "registral displacement", is used to present the figure in a more dramatic form that increases the intensity of the ending.The ending, a coda in Prestissimo (very quick), 116 quarter notes per minute, is a final, sweeping reiteration of the theme that closes in a heavy E minor chord,[14] which revisits Rachmaninoff's preoccupation with bell sounds, prominent in his Piano Concerto No. 2 and Prelude in C-sharp minor (Op. 3, No. 2). The piece is a major exercise in endurance and accuracy: the introduction opens in a left hand figure requiring span of a tenth interval. Additionally, octave intervals invariably appear before fast sextuplet runs, making quick wrists and arm action necessary. The double melodies Rachmaninoff uses in this work exists purposely to "keep both hands occupied," obscuring the melody and making it difficult for the right hand to project.