Don't tell the purists, but lots of classical music used to be popular.
     That's worth remembering as the Rachmaninoff Third Piano Concerto sails toward the Hollywood Bowl, borne on the winds of "Shine" and the latest David Helfgott tour, but also accompanied by the faintest sniff of elite disdain.
     Last March, in these pages [this piece was published in the Los Angeles Times], Times Music Critic Mark Swed took the highbrow view, in effect declaring the concerto too shallow and too flashy, nothing more than a "popular showpiece" with "sure-to-please gushy melodies." Earlier, Bernard Holland, chief classical music critic of the New York Times, rolled his eyes at Rachmaninoff's "weepy tunes," finally dismissing the Third Concerto as very nearly a musical con game "made to order for virtuosos on the make." And, of course, its popularity (which didn't start with Helfgott) only makes things worse. In 1993, Holland complained, fully five of the six pianists in the finals of the Van Cliburn competition all played the thing. He shuddered: "What a horrifying evening it was."

We might ask, of course, whether five renditions of any concerto on a single night wouldn't have been equally hard to take. But there's a larger point to make.
     Would Holland have been any happier in 1813, when Rossini's opera "Tancredi" was a smash hit in Venice? He couldn't have escaped it at the opera house, which would have been bad enough. But people also sang it on the street, and even in courtrooms, where the strains of its most popular aria are said to have disrupted a trial.
     Nor, perhaps, would he have been happy in Milan in 1845, when a giant barrel organ rumbled through the streets, playing not just excerpts from Verdi's "Giovanna d'Arco," but the entire score. And what would he write if he found himself in Europe in the 1830s, when Franz Liszt, the first of the great virtuoso pianists, went on tour? Liszt, as John Lennon said about the Beatles many years later, was more popular than Jesus. Trembling women ran after him, scooping up his discarded cigars. One of them even wore a smelly Liszt cigar butt around her neck.
     Talk about horror! Connoisseurs back then hated Liszt even more than Holland hates Rachmaninoff. So these battles aren't new, and if you step outside classical music, you find them raging everywhere.
     In art, is Julian Schnabel schlocky or significant? In theater, is Robert Wilson empty or profound? And in rock and roll, critics notoriously hate everything that's really popular. Can you name one who likes Michael Bolton, or Billy Joel? If you've been around the block a time or two, you rub your eyes in disbelief when tempests swirl around Rachmaninoff. At a time when classical music ought to worry about the loss of its audience (and its federal funding), why should it turn its anger on itself? Does it really want to turn away all the new listeners who have kept David Helfgott's Rach 3 recording at the top of the classical charts for months on end (and are buying other versions of the piece as well)?

Besides, is the poor, battered Third Concerto really as bad as all that? This past April, Joseph Kerman, professor of music at UC Berkeley and America's reigning musicologist, came galloping to rescue it. Kerman, apparently bemused by Holland's vehemence, undertook a wry inspection of Rach 3's structure, which he found not only free from termites but even architecturally profound.
     Or almost profound. Because even Kerman isn't totally convinced; he won't accept the second of the work's three movements, and thus his essay bears the mildly damning title "Two Cheers for Rach 3." So even a pundit who says he likes the piece is dissing it. How can mere non-musicological mortals decide how good or bad the Third Concerto is?
     One way to start would be to ask what Rachmaninoff himself was like. He was Russian, and, like many Russians, melancholy, despite a world-conquering career as a pianist, which brought him to New York to premiere the Third Concerto in 1909. He later settled in New York and ended his days as a Californian, dying in Beverly Hills in 1943.
     He didn't love the United States -- Americans, he thought, cared more for business than art -- but musically, at least, he developed a lively curiosity. He attended the premiere of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," admired jazz pianists, and played jazz himself, in private, for fun. According to pianist Byron Janis -- who studied with Vladimir Horowitz, who in turn knew Rachmaninoff, and told Janis many stories -- he would have been thrilled by the craze for his concerto. When he wrote the big lyrical climax in his Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Janis reports, he said, with great pleasure, "I've written a tune for Broadway!"

But that's not the whole story. Rachmaninoff was also an austere figure, and his own recording of his Third Concerto isn't weepy at all. Instead, it's lean and quick. "He was very aristocratic in his playing," Janis says, "and he didn't dawdle over sentimentality." (Maybe that's why critics didn't find the premiere mushy but instead worried that the work might be too long and too complex.)
     In his younger days, when he was a conductor, Rachmaninoff amazed audiences in Russia with equally unsentimental performances of Tchaikovsky, normally the gushiest of all the great composers. And in fact, his view of music was surprisingly cerebral. Each work, he declared, has a culminating point, which a performer must approach with "absolute calculation, absolute precision, because if it slips by, the piece becomes disjointed and scrappy."
     So if Rachmaninoff himself was serious, what about the Third Concerto? Right at the start, we hear something that isn't mush and certainly isn't music for a showoff soloist -- a quiet melody, as soulful as a Russian folk song, played without any fuss, while the strings of the orchestra murmur sadly underneath. If the pianist is Van Cliburn, the tune is dressed in unassuming melancholy. Horowitz makes it limpid, pure and pointedly alive. With Martha Argerich, it's troubled.
     Which tells us that the work is clearly more than empty virtuosity.
     Even better still, it's protean  -- within its limits, it's all things to all pianists, a point underscored by one of the breed, Alexander Toradze, who has played Rach 3, he thinks, about 150 times, one of them with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
     "The first, tenth, fiftieth look is scary," says Toradze, in enthusiastically Russian-accented tones. "But then magic happens, and it returns back to you unselfishly. It lets you really almost play with it during the concert. It invites you to be pianistically creative. Its pianistic vocabulary is staggering, from the simplest things to most complex."

 Furthermore, the work is subtle. Look at the printed score of that opening melody and you see its accents shifting when you least expect them to, the separate phrases of the tune -- its limbs and face, so to speak -- are oddly asymmetrical, as if the whole thing were modern art, and not the simple sketch it seems to be.
     This same point is made by Joseph Horowitz (no relation to Vladimir), who has written skeptical books about what he feels is the middlebrow culture of American classical music, and who, as executive producer of the radical Brooklyn Philharmonic Orchestra, is famous for planning programs that are challenging and intellectual. With those lofty credentials, you might expect him, too, to reject Rach 3, but he doesn't.
     Instead, he points out that, in generations past, hardly anybody played it. It belonged to super-virtuosos, first Rachmaninoff himself, then Vladimir Horowitz, and later Janis. (In those days, he might have added, the Rachmaninoff Second Concerto was the one you rolled your eyes at, the one whose love theme, so to speak, became a pop song, "Full Moon and Empty Arms.")
     He finds the Third Concerto quite original, "not a work that's churned out according to existing models." As evidence, he cites inner details. "When Prokofiev wants the music louder," Horowitz explains, comparing Rachmaninoff with another Russian composer, "he just marks 'louder' in the score. But Rachmaninoff can make a crescendo just by changing the pianistic texture," -- or, in other words, by rearranging notes, making them higher, lower, faster, or busier.
     Horowitz does find one weakness in the score, that same second movement that bothers Kerman. But even there he finds a ray of hope in the pianist's first entrance, a cascade of near-delirium after a sober, solemn introduction by the orchestra alone. "It's as if the pianist was thinking something that was hidden," says Horowitz, "as if the pianist was having a private experience."

And here we get to what might be the core of the piece, the pianist's role as protagonist -- sometimes heroic, sometimes much more inward -- of an enormous drama. Asked what kind of person this titanic soul might be, Janis answers with his thoughts about Rachmaninoff. "To me, he is a very noble soul, masculine and very powerful and very passionate." (Janis said that, touchingly, without nostalgia or regret. More than 30 years ago, he was stricken with arthritis, and while he's recently been able to resume his career, he'll never play Rachmaninoff again.)
     Toradze describes the saga from the inside. "You have to be ready to dive into the middle of the ocean. And all of a sudden you are up on the surface, because Rachmaninoff grasps the keys for you, so he leads you up to the fresh air." This, he says, is "sheer elevation of all the senses" -- including tiny intimate moments when he feels he's playing chamber music with members of the orchestra.
     So now let's return to the question of popularity. How could a work like this not be popular, once people had a chance to hear it? The pianist, heroically surging above the orchestra, provides a focus anyone can understand. And -- given its own requirements (and leaving aside the vexed question of David Helfgott's playing) -- how could the world of pop culture have made a better choice, if it wanted to adopt a tumultuous classic? Some people call the Third Concerto "movie music," but it's more than that: It's the entire movie. "If the concerto is well played, it's hard to listen to it casually," says Joseph Horowitz. "It forces a committed engagement."
     Let's be reasonable. Classical critics might like to see movies that promote composers like Stravinsky, or the revolutionary 12-tone ascetic Anton von Webern. But who's planning to make them?
     And if instead we get Rach 3 -- a compelling and strangely ambiguous musical drama that's even fun to talk about -- what's wrong with that?

Los Angeles Times, August 24, 1997