Achim Breiling wrote:

>Just a stupid question: Why did they do these cuts? To make the work fit
>to whatever (LP, radio broadcast) or to omit some too difficult passages?

Not at all a stupid question.  A lot of important late Romantic composers,
among them (gasp) Wagner.  Liszt and Richard Strauss made provision for
cuts in a variety of works.  Rachmaninoff continued this tradition.  His
own recording conducting "Isle of the Dead" is cut, as is his recording
of the Third Piano Concerto--I suspect that there were very few integral
recordings or performances of the Third, in fact until the 1960s.
Horowitz, a major interpreter of the piece recorded it with cuts the
first two times--and I don't know if the cuts were identical both times
or whether they correspond to Rachmaninoff's on or off records.

Michael Steinberg disusses the Rachmaninoff in "The Symphony" (OUP, 1995).
He tabulated timings for the Second Symphony as performed in concert by the
Boston Symphony Orchestra through the century, and found that the earliest
must have been complete (possibly including a first-movement exposition
repeat), but that around 1920, an allegedly authentic tradtion of
abridgements evolved, based on cuts made by Josef Stransky, then conductor
of the NY Philharmonic.  Rachmaninoff, asked about these further
complicated the issue by saying that he 'approved' them but would not make
them himself.

As far as he can tell, it was not until 1973 that the Second Symphony
was restored to full length both in the concert hall and on records,,
by Andre Previn and the LSO, and not until 1994 that recordings with the
first movement repeat appeared.  Steinberg concludes with the excellent
observation "Cuts do not solve formal problems: they merely shorten the
time you have to spend dealing with them.  Paradoxically, a work may feel
longer when it is cut because the proportions are off and the distribution
of light and shade is all wrong."

As I mentioned in an earlier post, as recently as six-seven years back
a young Russian emigre pianist, now at Juilliard, played the Rachmaninoff
Third with me, and insisted on what he said were "the" traditional set
of cuts, which his teacher had gotten from the composer.  They may have
been "a" traditional set of cuts, but I'm not sure they were the unique
sanctioned set.  The orchestra and I detested them (several wonderful
episodes in the Finale gone with the wind), and didn't particularly like
his playing.  We arranged for a repeat performance with another pianist
(known to do it at full length) after a decent interval had elapsed, and
a good time was had by all.

Joel Lazar
Conductor, Bethesda MD
[log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]>