Preludes

To U. S. citizens who stay away from concerts, the best-known high-brow composer now living is probably Russian-born Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninoff. His crashing Prelude in C-Sharp Minor, first introduced to the U. S. in 1898 by his friend Pianist Alexander Siloti, immediately started to outsell Tin Pan Alley's song hits, has rolled up a total of some 5,000,000 copies. In 1909, when 36-year-old Rachmaninoff made his U. S. debut as a concert pianist, the "Flatbush* Prelude," as it was then known, had made his exotic name familiar to U. S. lips.

Rachmaninoff lived to regret the popularity of his Prelude. He himself gave it more than 1,000 performances in the U. S. alone, got so sick of it that the mere sound of its three opening crashes gave him the creeps. Once, when asked in an interview how it should be played, he wrung his hands and replied hoarsely: "I do not care! They can play it any way they choose just so long as they do not play it where I can hear it."

Last week Conductor Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra put on an all-Rachmaninoff program, with 65-year-old Rachmaninoff himself as soloist. Besides his First Piano Concerto and Third Symphony were played three of his Preludes, newly tricked out in orchestral dress by Orchestrator Lucien Cailliet.

One of the Preludes was the famed "Flatbush." After listening to Cailliet's orchestration, the gloomy Rachmaninoff unbent, expressed himself as "happy" with the results. After the concert he unbent still further, told Philadelphia reporters he disliked swing but greatly admired the jazz of 15 years ago. "Ah," said Pianist Rachmaninoff, "if I could only hear that fine pianist, Eddy Duchin, playing Irving Berlin's Blue Skies, I'd be very happy."

While it is his ubiquitous Prelude in C-Sharp Minor that has won Rachmaninoff his fame with the public, discriminating concertgoers have long rated him as one of the two greatest living pianists. (The other: Polish-born Josef Hofmann.)

When he is not on tour Rachmaninoff lives in seclusion, spends his winters in his Manhattan apartment, his summers on his Swiss estate. Once a year he gives Manhattanites a single Carnegie Hall recital from which thousands are invariably turned away. He has never played over the radio.

Though the U. S. has been his winter home for many years, he has never applied for U. S. citizenship, considers himself a permanent Russian refugee. A mournful-visaged, crop-headed aristocrat, who was dispossessed of his Russian estates by the revolution of 1917, he is even sicker of Russia's present government than of his besetting Prelude. Asked recently what kind of government would attract him back to Russia again, Rachmaninoff replied: "A better one."

*A suburban section of Brooklyn, once thickly inhabited by hopeful piano students.

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