7th March 2023
Equally at home on the concert stage as in the pit, conductor and pianist Chris Hopkins is engaged on a wide range of projects across many disciplines. He is a frequent face at English National Opera, this season conducting the company’s first ever production of The Yeomen of the Guard to great critical acclaim. Recently he conducted the new Olivier Award-nominated production of HMS Pinafore following from previous acclaimed performances of La Boheme, The Mikado, Iolanthe, The Magic Flute, and others. He recently made his debut with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in works by Kashperova, Liszt and Franck and next season makes debuts with various other companies, including conducting a new production of Werther at Grange Park Opera with Tony Award-winning director John Doyle.
He is principal conductor of English Sinfonia and has worked at the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne Opera, with Grange Park Opera, Opera de Paris, on record with English Chamber Orchestra, on other projects with Royal Ballet Sinfonia, Crash Ensemble, London Mozart Players, Birdgang Ltd, and appeared at many festivals including Aldeburgh, Presteigne, Cubitt Sessions, New Paths, and Latitude. His work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 2, 3 and 4, BBC 1, 2 and 4.
A long-term advocate for British music, Chris was the first postgraduate from the Centre for the History of Music in Britain, the Empire and the Commonwealth (CHOMBEC) before continuing his studies at the Royal Academy of Music with Leverhulme and Elton John scholarships. He has premiered works by composers including Colin Matthews, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, David Matthews, Rob Keeley, Thomas Hyde, Detlev Glanert, Gilad Hochman and the Pet Shop Boys. He continues into a twelfth season as Musical Director of Orchestra of the City.
As a pianist, Chris has played for audiences around the world, working with orchestras in a range of concertos, including Brahms, Mozart, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Beethoven (complete), Shostakovich and Gershwin; this season he tackles Mozart 15, 19, 22, 23 and 24, Rachmaninoff 2, Beethoven 4 and Shostakovich 2. He is also a writer for Pretty Decent Music and recently released his first album of piano miniatures: Impressions I.
Chris was honoured in 2013 to be made an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music.
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What an incredible discovery by Dr Graham Griffiths!
Amazing. One of many, many composers that I’m sure are lurking in libraries waiting to be rediscovered. Kashperova is something really special in terms of the piano pedagogy, and her music is wonderful. It’s an absolute travesty that it’s been hidden for so long. Thank God for people like Graham Griffiths who discovered it.
I hear you recorded the Piano Concerto last April (2022).
That’s right, with Alexandra Dariescu and the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Graham told me that the original conductor wasn’t able to make it over from Vienna.
That’s right. It was a fortuitous story, as I’d worked with Alexandra earlier in the year. I run a brilliant amateur orchestra called Orchestra of the City, and she wanted to have a gentle, lower stress concert than her usual international obligations. We programmed the Cesar Franck Symphonic Variations, and did it in concert. She had this Kashperova concerto coming up and as the parts had not been used since 1901, I agreed to a kind of scratch rehearsal with my orchestra, so she could go through it before she recorded it with the BBC Symphony. The orchestra loved playing it, and it was great for Alexandra because she had had nothing to go on in terms of actually hearing how the music goes (other than from her own imagination, looking at the score). It was wonderful to think this music had been undiscovered for over a hundred years and now, for the first time, these notes were being heard again – it was magic.
When we conduct new commissions we have never heard the piece before, but of course we are usually able to speak with the composer. Is it very different to prepare when you’re uncovering a piece that is newly discovered like this?
Kind of, but if I’m learning a piece I try not to get to bogged down in what other people have done anyway. I like to have a good idea of the biographical details where they’re appropriate, and where it sits in history, but I try to let the music speak on its own terms. In that sense working on this piece was great because you haven’t got any hang-ups from hearing previous recordings, or too many historical and stylistic questions. It was totally fresh, and you can look at it without any preconceptions. It’s just all in the score.
We had the brilliant resource of Dr Griffiths, who is as close to this music as anyone in the world, so it was great to get his thoughts and insights into her style. But essentially there’s a wonderful freshness when approaching a piece like this for the first time, and just discovering what’s there. I’m sure there are more levels to discover had we had more time – things change in every performance, the more times you play it the more you’ll find. It’s very exciting to just pull back the duvet and see what’s there, it’s wonderful.
You’re an extremely accomplished pianist yourself, working as a soloist as well as a conductor. I’ve heard mixed reviews about working with the same kind of instrumentalist as you in a concerto setting. Does it make it easier or more stressful?
I can imagine if there was a piece you’ve played a hundred times as a soloist and then suddenly the shoe was on the other foot as the conductor, there could be all sorts of egos at play. But I like to think it made it easier, and the piece was unknown and so fresh that I didn’t have very strong opinions about how it should be performed. I was very happy to be led by Alex, she’s just such a brilliant musician and pianist, and I felt we worked well together. We discussed things, talked about options, and made suggestions to each other – it was very much a two-way street. I don’t think there were any difficulties, it was very easy, open and honest. I have total respect for her playing – it’s just incredible.
Graham said you had a real affinity with the piece.
Well, what’s not to love? It’s got great tunes, an amazing piano part and interesting orchestral writing. It’s a great concerto.
It’s absolutely beautiful. There are a lot of notes.
Yep!
You need a very, very strong technique. In the existing literature the subject of her left hand parts kept coming up – they’re very challenging. Does any of that influence how you work with the pianist?
A lot of those problems are for the pianist to work out. It’s certainly true that the left hand is strikingly difficult. Kashperova was obviously an unbelievable pianist – she graduated top of Rubinstein’s class. There were four pianists in that class at the conservatoire and she was the best of them. They had these big, open three-hour long lessons where they’d have an audience and people would pack the hall – I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been!
I read that Kashperova played Beethoven’s Opus 90 in one of Rubinstein’s classes – she had struggled with the tenths in the left hand. Rubinstein had taken her to task about her left hand in public, and that obviously stuck.[1] I wonder whether Rubinstein’s focus on the left hand had an influence on the way she wrote, certainly in this piano concerto. It’s not just hard in terms of notes (and there are a lot of notes!) – the gestures are also hard, and quite often they feel like they go in the wrong direction. Often, when we play Chopin or Brahms etc., we play gestures that move from the bass and go quickly up and back down. That’s a very natural movement, we’re all accustomed to that.
But quite often Kashperova goes the other way – you get these arpeggio runs downwards and then a big leap at the bottom. It’s terrifying writing – we’re used to that in the right hand to an extent (in music like Liszt), but to have that in the left hand as well is a huge challenge. It’s certainly a feature of her writing that this left hand workout is always there. These figurations are hard (for example, the first movement solo passage starting at bar 112 p.14) – a lot of people would have just written them the other way round and it would have been much easier. That simple change, turning the music on its head, makes life a lot more difficult.
Are there any particularly difficult sections from that point of view?
Well, the first and third movements are both really hard. The third has a lot of big leaps – things like octave runs with thirds underneath (see bars 253-258 p.79-80). It’s just relentless. You get 7 bars at the beginning of the first movement and then the piano starts. Apart from one other 12-bar tutti in the middle (bars 207-218 p.26-27) that’s the only real break. The solo part just keeps going. It’s not always jumping around, there are lots of lyrical moments, and she also uses the piano as accompaniment as well, letting the orchestra take the tune. But in terms of the stamina, concentration required, volume of notes and bars you’re in, it’s pretty relentless.
What about the use of the sustain pedal? Stravinsky said, ‘Mlle Kashperova’s only idiosyncrasy as a teacher was in forbidding me all use of the pedals. I had to sustain with my fingers, like an organist’ (Griffiths 2023: 13). I imagine that could be Rubinstein’s influence. How does that apply in this piece?
It’s a good question – there are certainly lots of passages where the harmony is changing all the time. The beginning of the third movement is mainly in octaves (bars 5-14 p.55-6) – you can imagine not wanting to muddy that with pedal, tempting as it would be. But then there are lyrical parts in the middle where you’d want a little bit just to keep the bass supporting the melody where the harmonic changes aren’t so sudden.
It sounds like the pedal would be used more sparingly than in other piano music of that era.
In comparison to Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff, I would certainly think so. It’s more judicious use, I would say. It’s hard to tell without having anything to go on in terms of her own style of playing. You have to use your own judgement.
The first movement has this very striking big, low brass beginning. It’s really heavy and kind of grungy. Then there’s the big florid opening for the piano (bar 8 p.1). You might think this is going to be a big weighty, dark sounding piece, but actually it very quickly opens up and it’s full of light. It’s very delicate in the way that it’s orchestrated – quite often with single woodwind, minimal strings underneath and melodies prancing around. It’s not heavy handed at all.
You just mentioned style. As you said, we know almost nothing about Kashperova’s performances – obviously there are no recordings and hardly any performance history.[2] So how on earth do you develop a ‘Kashperova style’?
That’s a very good question! Again, I just focus on what’s in the score. For example, the way she writes for the winds is very transparent and considered. Where she places the different colours is done with care and lucidity. I think that informs us to an extent, you don’t want big weighty, laden sounds – it has a kind of lightness to it.
It’s obvious, in a sense, in this first movement because after that really weighty beginning with the trombones, it opens into this lightness in the piano and delicate winds (from fig. A p.3). It gives you a whole different feeling. For me it’s always got to have line – you can see this in the score, and that’s the case with Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky and that whole era. She worked with Leopold Auer and Rostropovich’s father’s teacher, cellist Aleksandr Verzhbilovich, so there’s some hint of that lineage going down through to Rostropovich. We get a lot of that style of playing in this piece – very lyrical and beautifully legato.
I see. I asked because Graham wrote, ‘far from harbouring a cavalier attitude to tempo, it was one of Rubinstein’s main concerns, together with style. If his pupils’ performance became too indulgent with either, he would rein them in with the caution: ‘Le trop c’est l’ennemie du bien’ (Griffiths 2023:59).
As Kashperova looked up to him so much, I wondered whether those same concerns would have been inherited…
There are no metronome marks in this piece, just musical terms. Did you follow your own instincts, or Alexandra’s?
Well, more Alexandra’s as a starting point. Gesturally, there were certainly demands that, to some extent, dictated the envelope in which we were working. Some of these passages basically have a speed limit. Kashperova played the premiere herself, so maybe there was no need to put in hundreds of metronome marks or be super-detailed about it. From Allegro maestoso you get the feeling of what she wanted. Then the soloist can take off how they want to.
You also have to decide what speaks best. Often passages actually sound faster if they’re played slightly slower. For example, the end of the third movement of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 [demonstrates on the piano][3] – can be a gabble at that speed. If you just take 10% off the speed – by virtue of being able to hear more detail it actually sounds busier and more virtuosic. Similarly with this Kashperova piece, there’s so much detail in some of the more virtuosic, florid passages that just going at the maximum speed isn’t going to give you the biggest thrill ride. I always think that fingers can move faster than our ears – the speed limit is not necessarily what will make it bubble the most effervescently.
A lot of thought goes into the basic tempo, but more often than not the piano sets it. That opening is like a fantasy. In a way, it doesn’t really matter what speed the orchestra goes at because soloist sets the tempo when they start. The pianist sets the speed for the Allegro (fig. A) when the tempo picks up and set the speed when it slows down again. In a sense, the piano is always in control of the tempo of an upcoming section.
Finding the light and shade in that first movement is key because it turns on a dime. In the blink of an eye it goes from something incredibly light (there’s a Chopin-like lightness to it), into something much more weighty with double octaves all over the place and tons of big chords. It’s hard to have enough mental preparation to be able to change direction and just switch between those two moods.
Are there any particularly challenging aspects of the work for the conductor?
The transitions are definitely hard. Thankfully, although I only had a very short time with Alex, we had played the piece through on two pianos to get used to how those transitions could work. The minute it becomes technically demanding, a battle, or she starts to feel that she has to lead and tell the orchestra through her playing what the tempo is, it adds another level of stress that isn’t useful. It’s much better if we can be on the same wavelength, and those transitions can just happen immediately and are always supportive of what the soloist is doing. That’s quite hard.
I talked a lot with Graham about tempo at the beginning of the second movement. It’s marked Andante but then Graham said to me that the fundamental tempo is actually Adagio. It’s a very sparse opening (p.42) – just pizzicato in the strings and a little bit of wind on top – it’s very static. There’s no real melody for a good half a minute, and when there is one it evaporates so quickly. It’s the longest section of orchestral music without the piano in the whole piece (26 bars), so we had the discussion (and this is ongoing) about whether we go for absolute stasis, almost like a hypnotic meditation and accept that we’re not trying to get anywhere quickly, or more Andante, and try and give it more direction.
In the end we found we preferred the stasis, especially after the monumental first movement. It’s like a wonderful sorbet – just to have a minute of real calm and allow the purity of the instruments and quality of the wind playing to speak. I think it’s wonderful that in the middle of two quite bombastic movements we have the poise that she gives at the beginning. We had to try not to drive it. That’s the kind of thing you really don’t know until you try it. This was the luxury of being able to try it out with my own orchestra before conducting it with the BBC Symphony Orchestra.
Then the pianist comes in [plays bar 27].
That’s such a beautiful moment.
It’s a beautiful introduction. Having lulled you into that hypnotic state, she just hits you with this [plays from bar 46]. It’s just the most beautiful melody that goes on and on, and it’s got the descending left hand characteristic that we were talking about earlier. That whole section is absolutely stunning, even more so in the context of the whole piece – you’re given a moment to relax after the first movement. It’s like we’re in this kind of fantasy opening – it’s filigree and twinkly at the top. Then suddenly it’s like coming into a clearing in the middle of a woodland and there’s this beautiful simplicity. There’s a long melody, with beautiful harmony. It took my breath away the first time I heard it.
The strings start to come in very gently, cellos first (bar 70) with this countermelody. There are little quirks, oddly two bassoons (bar 71) that give it an unusual colour. Over the scope of a good five minutes, the music just grows and grows and grows. It’s a real mastery of a second movement on a small and large scale. On Classic FM you hear the Grieg or Rachmaninoff 2nd movements all the time. You could put this on, and it would be an immediate hit.
I think so. It’s not an acquired taste at all.
No, not at all. It’s all there – it’s perfectly proportioned, with a beautiful melody.
We had two days with the BBC – it was basically rehearse, record. It’s not like we got a week to know the piece and each other – from day one we were thinking about getting this on record, it was a quick turnaround. It was definitely a challenge! The orchestra were amazing – they just read and played everything brilliantly, it’s incredible. As long as I’m clear they’ll follow immediately, so in that sense time wasn’t an issue. For me, it was a case of understanding every inflection and nuance of Alex’s playing, and making sure she was being supported by the orchestra. On a basic level that’s about tempo and transitions, and on a higher level it’s about gestures and shapes. Are we coming away from this? Or are we heading toward this? When it’s passing round the orchestra what’s our overall shape, and where’s it heading? Where are the interesting moments?
So balance wasn’t an issue?
No, the balance was fine because it’s beautifully written. There is a big climax in the third movement (from p.81) when the orchestra have the massive tune – it’s a culmination of a very delicate section of chamber music. The piano’s rattling away with a million notes and arpeggios and it’s a lovely moment – it feels like it’s subsumed in the orchestra. It’s as close to a balance issue as you get – it’s not quite an orchestral piano, but it’s absorbed into the whole. It’s orchestra led at that moment, it’s glorious when that happens.
For all of the filigree music and anything that’s of pianistic interest, the writing is so delicately done that there were very few balance questions. If anything, it was more about encouraging the winds in particular to play soloistically as well. They didn’t take much convincing, but there can be a tendency in a concerto situation to support the soloist with orchestral playing. What you really want in this piece (and it’s most obvious in the string solos, but there are also many wind solos) is for it to feel like chamber music on a big scale – there’s an interaction between the individual players and the pianist. It’s actually soloistic playing, Kashperova played lots of chamber music herself.
The last movement starts jauntily, it’s not quite a dance but it’s close. But then it feels like there’s a beautiful secondary theme (p.56 bar 18) which is much more lyrical. It’s starts with just piano (p.59 bar 39), then piano and solo cello (p.60 bar 43), and then a solo violin is added (p.61 bar 66). It’s quite striking in the context of the piece to suddenly have solo strings for a few beautiful moments. It’s clearly a nod to her piano trio that she had in St. Petersburg, with Leopold Auer on violin and Aleksandr Verzhbilovich on cello – in a gracious way, I think.
The orchestration in the big climax (from bar 261 p.81) that we were just talking about is interesting. We’ve got full brass, horns playing held chords, and a bit of countermelody in the trumpets. The bass is obviously heard in the celli, double basses and bassoons and the violas, second violins and first violins, clarinets, oboes, and flutes are all playing the melody. This is an incredibly virtuosic piano concerto with a ridiculously demanding part – the quality of orchestration isn’t something you would naturally go to as a talking point. But this is fascinating: despite everyone playing fortissimo and cantabile with a massive tune, she’s left space in the texture. By virtue of having this tune in triple octaves, it’s fairly sparse in terms of the harmony in the middle. That’s when the piano is playing [plays piano part p. 81]. There’s still space in the sound for that pianistic gesture to come through. It seems to me very considered that it’s not just a big climax – the orchestra has the melody and bass line and the rest is filled out by this incredibly virtuosic piano writing. You might not hear every note but it’s a third part of the texture in a very lucid way.
Absolutely – the piano can hold it’s own with the orchestra.
Alexandra’s brilliant – she’s so open, and a brilliant chamber musician. It’s an interaction – that’s not always the case. There are lots of soloists who will play brilliantly, but there’s always a dialogue with Alexandra, so it’s much more of a conversation, not just in terms of words, but also musical ideas. As long as you’re listening to each other, you’re in a wonderful kind of constant flux of musical conversation. From my perspective as a conductor, that’s the best. Of course, everyone in the orchestra is always listening to the soloist’s every nuance. But if you can work with a soloist that’s also really open-eared about what you and the orchestra are doing, and it works both ways, it makes for a much more satisfying experience.
I think all orchestral music should be treated like chamber music, in that every musician should feel an ownership of it, in the same way that you would feel an ownership of the viola part in a string quartet. That’s the most exciting kind of orchestral music making. There’s something about the set up of a concerto that can lend itself to losing that aspect, especially if you don’t have that much time. The soloist has been practising the piece six hours a day for a year, so when they’re welcomed to the orchestra, it’s not always a two-way dialogue. When it is, it’s wonderful.
I imagine that interaction is especially important when it’s a piece that’s never been heard before.
Absolutely, it’s so individual. When you have brilliant musicians like those in the BBC Symphony, they will play gestures and phrases that haven’t been heard for over a hundred years in a way that’s so beautiful and you hadn’t really considered. So I’ll think, ‘well, that’s fantastic, we’ll take that!’ and vice versa: sometimes I’ll make a suggestion and that makes it more satisfying for them. It’s very much a conversation, especially with a piece that’s never been heard. It’s like a wonderful Christmas present!
Yes, listening to the piece felt like opening a treasure chest! I can only imagine how Graham must have felt going to the archives and libraries in St Petersburg and Moscow and discovering all of this music.
Yes, something that’s just been languishing there. I try and keep the repertoire interesting with my orchestra and not just stick to the well-trodden paths. We’re just about to do delve into Louise Farrenc’s Symphony No. 3, and we also played Myaskosvky’s Symphony No. 27, which are both wonderful. As far as I can tell the Myaskovsky has only been played once in this country. One of the best things about lockdown for me was to really dig in to Ruth Gipps’ music, and slightly stubbornly because there was a piece I’d heard about that I wanted to find. I just couldn’t find it anywhere, but after a while I’d worked out where her catalogue was. Suddenly I came across five symphonies, piano music, concertos, string orchestra pieces etc. – some of which has been recorded fairly recently. I looked for the piece that I really wanted to find, and there it was! Incredible.
The feeling when you start playing a piece that only exists in manuscript, when you’ve never heard it and really don’t know what to expect, is incredible. You have this immediate link to someone you’ve never met, from a different time. Somehow they’re speaking to you through what they’ve written down on the manuscript paper. It’s absolutely thrilling. I can’t imagine what it was like for Graham to find that huge symphony, this concerto and all the rest of Kashperova’s music. It must have been amazing.
The most disappointing thing about it as that there isn’t more of her symphonic writing. The symphony is so good, and the orchestral writing in this concerto is too. I just wish there was more of it, because it’s composed with craft, thought, lyricism and punch when it needs it. It has all sorts of colours in it. I want more, basically! (laughs)
I know, what a woman! But I’m also sad that we’re only hearing her music now.
In her own memoirs, Kashperova wrote: ‘she [Sofia Alexdrovna Malozyomova] began to persuade Anton Grigorievich to take me on, and several other professors joined in. Anton Grigorievich said, ‘I will accept her, but she will join Solovyov’s composition class, as it is not acceptable to have two specialities’ (cited Griffiths 2023:49).
That paragraph made me wonder if her conservatoire studies made a difference to how she was seen, both at the time and later into her career (i.e. a pianist, first and foremost, rather than as a composer).
I imagine part of it is just the practicalities of life. You’re going to get more work more readily as a pianist, like concerts and tours to Berlin and London (especially as a stratospherically incredible pianist like it sounds like she was). I think she would sometimes programme some of her own music, but fundamentally I suppose that has to happen off the back of other people’s work. Even Rachmaninoff was known primarily as a touring pianist. Beethoven did the same, they all did – it’s just the fundamental of making a living. Kashperova did a lot of teaching too.
I hope this piece catches on and finds its place in the piano repertoire. It’s such a gem.
I hope so. I will certainly programme it at any opportunity possible. Thanks to Graham and Boosey, we’ve got great parts – it’s all there. As long as the parts are accessible for people and it’s not prohibitively expensive to put on, then it should be heard more. If you think of the canon of piano concertos that get played, it’s pretty small. Sometimes you see programmes advertising Tchaikovsky’s second concerto as a kind of leftfield choice (laughs). Is that the best they can do to diversify the canon? We’ve got this stonking concerto here which has got far more in it than a lot of the concertos that are churned out.
It’s also eminently programmable. It uses the standard forces, there’s nothing wild there (as long as someone is capable the formidable task of playing the solo part). There are hundreds of orchestras that could programme this in a concert and it would be hugely successful. It could fit in just as easily as the piano concertos we hear played nine times out of ten – Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Schumann, Grieg… This would be a nice alternative. Once you get a piece going I think it starts to take hold.
Actually, it has been lovely to come back to this piece again. I conducted it in April last year, so it’s easy to kind of let it disappear into the past to some extent (although I’m still thinking about how we can programme it). It was nice to get back into the score again and reflect on it all, as it happened very quickly in the space of a week. In the heat of it, you’ve got to really get inside it, be passionate about the music and convey that to the orchestra. Now I’ve come back to it a few months later, it’s still there – I still love it. I think it’s beautifully put together, and should be played all over the world. Sometimes you need that passing of time to reflect on how you really feel about a piece. Now I’m not as deeply immersed in it, it’s nice to hear it with fresher ears. I still think it’s such a satisfying piece.
It’s just amazing. Thank you so much Chris for fitting me in, this has been brilliant.
Ah, it’s a pleasure. I could talk about it all day – it’s lovely! Thanks, Hannah.
Bibliography/Recommended audio-visual resources
Griffiths, G. Leokadiya Kashperova: Biography, ‘Memoirs’, and ‘Recollections of Anton Rubinstein’ (Cambridge University Press 2023)
Leokadiya Kashperova: 1872-1940 BBC Radio 3 Composer of the Week released 16th December 2022
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p0dn2qqb
Kashperova, L. (1900) Piano Concerto in A minor Op. 2 for piano and orchestra (Boosey and Hawkes) Edited by Graham Griffiths
In Search of Kashperova: Symphony Memories (Episode 1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WQ_BswMUC4 (accessed 3rd March 2023)
In Search of Kashperova: Rubinstein’s Pupil (Episode 2) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6H_3VRrp6w (accessed 3rd March 2023)
In Search of Kashperova: Cello Sonatas (Episode 3) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAmeGL8NkRc (accessed 3rd March 2023)
In Search of Kashperova: Stravinsky’s Teacher (Episode 4) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2GgHGnPeS8 (accessed 4th March 2023)
In Search of Kashperova: Russian Voices (Episode 5) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-o0bHyFCBe8 (accessed 4th March 2023)
[1] ‘Beethoven’s Sonata [no. 27] opus 90 was less successful: I couldn’t capture the drama of the first movement, and the only way that I could manage the left-hand tenths was to play them as arpeggios. He got angry and said, “You are only pretending to have small hands.” I found this offensive and hurtful’ (cited Griffiths 2023:49).
[2] Since the interview I have been alerted to this piano roll recording made in Feb. 1910, found by Dr Graham Griffiths at the Brentford Musical Museum https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePaWef3WYdQ (accessed 24th March)
[3] See fig. 28 https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/2/25/IMSLP00297-Rachmaninoff_-_Piano_Concerto_No.2_-_Mov.III.pdf