Rachmaninoff. How Peaceful op. 21/7

Listen to the complete album, recorded on the Steinway & Sons label

One of my favorite Rachmaninov’s vocal pieces is the romance “How Peaceful”. The desire to arrange it for piano has been growing since my school years, I just lacked that final impulse. And one day it happened. I did it on the airplane flying from Khabarovsk to Sakhalin, the place where I was born and had a happy childhood and which I had not visited in eighteen long years, having left for Moscow many years before.

I have always thought about this romance as if melting in a dream with a quiet culmination and did not plan to change anything. However, to my surprise, I wrote it in a different way. Later on, while playing the transcription on the piano I tried to understand why it turned out to be so openly passionate, and it occurred to me that this transcription was not about dissolving in nature or dreams, but about a strong and burning feeling of a man who was once happy here. And one who with all his heart and soul is trying to bring back that feeling of happiness, being perhaps very far away from his beloved home land. I can imagine that Rachmaninov who was forced to leave his motherland might not have left the culmination so calm if he transcribed the romance.