After hear­ing this week from two great French com­posers linked to the Impres­sion­ist move­ment–Claude Debussy and Mau­rice Rav­el–we con­tin­ue our series of clas­sic piano-roll record­ings with a trio of per­for­mances by the last of the great Russ­ian Roman­tic com­posers: Sergei Rach­mani­noff.

When the Bol­she­viks seized the aris­to­crat­ic Rach­mani­nof­f’s estate short­ly after the Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917, he and his fam­i­ly fled to Scan­di­navia and then to Amer­i­ca, where they arrived in Novem­ber of 1918. To make mon­ey, the cash-strapped émi­gré put aside com­pos­ing and embarked on a gru­el­ing per­for­mance sched­ule, and in March of 1919 agreed to make a series of piano-roll record­ings for the Amer­i­can Piano Com­pa­ny, or “Ampi­co.”

It was a time of tran­si­tion for musi­cal enter­tain­ment. Most fam­i­lies who were not poor owned a piano, in keep­ing with the tra­di­tion that home enter­tain­ment was a do-it-your­self affair. But as tech­nol­o­gy advanced, peo­ple became more accus­tomed to the idea of hear­ing the music of a world-famous vir­tu­oso in their own liv­ing room. Play­er pianos, or pianolas, sound­ed bet­ter than ear­ly phono­graphs and could still serve the func­tion of a reg­u­lar piano, so for awhile there was a boom­ing busi­ness in the per­fo­rat­ed paper rolls that kept them play­ing.

Rach­mani­noff was inter­est­ed in tap­ping into the piano roll mar­ket, but was skep­ti­cal at first about the qual­i­ty of the record­ings. When he made his first record­ing at the Ampi­co stu­dio in New York, he was pleas­ant­ly sur­prised when he heard the play­back. “Gen­tle­men,” he report­ed­ly said, “I, Sergei Rach­mani­noff, have just heard myself play.” He would even­tu­al­ly record 35 pieces for Ampi­co between 1919 and 1929, twelve of which were his own com­po­si­tions. In the video above, we hear three of his best-known piano-roll record­ings:

1. Rach­mani­noff plays his famous Pre­lude in C Sharp Minor, Op. 3, No. 2 , from the 1892 suite, Morceaux de fan­taisie (“Fan­ta­sy Pieces”), record­ed on March 17, 1919.
2. Rach­mani­noff plays his own piano tran­scrip­tion of his pop­u­lar 1902 song “Lilacs,” from 12 Romances (also known as 12 Songs), Op. 21, record­ed on April 6, 1922.
3. Rach­mani­noff plays a famous short piece writ­ten by anoth­er Russ­ian com­pos­er: Niko­lai Rim­sky-Kor­sakov’s 1903 “Flight of the Bum­ble­bee,” record­ed on Feb­ru­ary 1, 1929.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Rav­el Plays Rav­el: The Haunt­ing, Melan­choly ‘Oiseaux Tristes,’ 1922

Debussy Plays Debussy: The Great Com­poser’s Play­ing Returns to Life

Watch the Great Russ­ian Com­pos­er Sergei Rach­mani­noff in Home Movies

Yes­ter­day we fea­tured a piano-roll record­ing of the French com­pos­er Claude Debussy play­ing his “La soirée dans Grenade” in 1913. Today we bring you a lyri­cal and melan­choly work record­ed in 1922 on a sim­i­lar device by Debussy’s younger friend and rival, Mau­rice Rav­el. It’s called “Oiseaux tristes,” or “Sad Birds.”

The impe­tus for com­pos­ing the piece came in 1904, when Rav­el heard a sec­ond-hand account of some­thing Debussy had said. Accord­ing to Alex­is Roland-Manuel, Rav­el’s friend and biog­ra­ph­er, Debussy had told the pianist Ricar­do Viñes that when writ­ing his exper­i­men­tal piece, “D’un cahi­er d’esquiss­es,” he had been “dream­ing of a kind of music whose form was so free that it would sound impro­vised, of works which would seem to have been torn out of a sketch­book.”

Viñes recount­ed Debussy’s state­ment at a meet­ing of “Les Apach­es,” a group of rad­i­cal writ­ers, artists and musi­cians, of which Rav­el was a mem­ber. Rav­el respond­ed by say­ing that he was ready to put Debussy’s dream into action. He drew his inspi­ra­tion from an expe­ri­ence he had one morn­ing in the for­est at Fontain­bleau. Rav­el’s friend and for­mer music school class­mate Émile Vuiller­moz remem­bered:

He was stay­ing with friends and one morn­ing he heard a black­bird whistling a tune and was enchant­ed by its ele­gant, melan­choly arabesque. He had mere­ly to tran­scribe this tune accu­rate­ly, with­out chang­ing a note, to pro­duce the limpid, poet­ic piece which spir­i­tu­alis­es the nos­tal­gic call of this French broth­er of the For­est Bird in Siegfried.

After the meet­ing, Rav­el set to work on the E Flat Minor “Oiseaux tristes,” which he ded­i­cat­ed to Viñes and includ­ed in his five-piece suite, Miroirs. “Oiseaux tristes is the most typ­i­cal of my way of think­ing,” Rav­el wrote in his 1928 auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal sketch. “It evokes birds lost in the oppres­sive­ness of a very dark for­est dur­ing the hottest hours of sum­mer.”

Rav­el record­ed “Oiseaux tristes” and four oth­er pieces in Lon­don on June 30, 1922, using a Duo-Art repro­duc­ing piano. Unlike the Welte-Mignon machine used by Debussy in 1913 (Rav­el also made a pair of record­ings on the Welte-Mignon at about the same time as Debussy) the Duo-Art sys­tem did not auto­mat­i­cal­ly record the dynam­ics of the per­for­mance. So when Rav­el played “Oiseaux tristes” at the stu­dio in Lon­don, there was an engi­neer seat­ed next to him at a con­sole, turn­ing dials to cap­ture the dynam­ic mod­u­la­tions in his play­ing. After­ward, Rav­el lis­tened to a play­back on a pianola and, sat­is­fied with the results, signed his name on the orig­i­nal roll.