I. Vivace
II. Andante
III. Allegro vivace

In Russian schools in the late 19th century, the highest mark a pupil could receive was a “5+”. When in 1887 at the Moscow Conservatoire, a 14 year old pupil turned in a perfect performance at a harmony exam and proceeded to play several of his own compositions to the examiners, a member of the teaching staff, a certain Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky, asked for this pupil's report book, and besides the “5+” grade already awarded, added a further three “+”s for good measure. “That is what sealed my fate”, recalled Sergei Rachmaninov, many years later, “and I officially became a composer.”

And yet Rachmaninov's early musical studies were not without their stumbles. The talented but rather disorganised young man first won a scholarship to the St Petersburg Conservatoire but his poor exam results led to the school threatening to withdraw its financial support. Rachmaninov's pianist uncle Alexander Siloti decided to take matters into his own hands and enrolled his nephew into the Moscow Conservatoire where he entered the piano class of the legendarily strict Nikolai Zverev as well as Sergei Taneyev's composition class. The change in climate and the highly disciplined environment worked wonders as we have already seen. Rachmaninov soon became the premiere star of the Conservatoire, despite the presence of his classmate, the no less spectacularly gifted Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). In 1891, Rachmaninov completed his studies with the “Grand Gold Medal” for excellence and retired to his family estate to complete the first work which he regarded as deserving of an opus number. He wrote to a Moscow roommate on July 20th: “I completed the score of my piano concerto on July 6th. I could have completed it much earlier but after the first movement I dwardled for a bit and only began writing the other two on July 3rd. I completed these and orchestrated them in only two days. You can imagine how much work this entailed! I worked from five in the morning until eight at night, so I was wretchedly tired by the end. Then I relaxed a little. When I am working, I am never tired, indeed I positively enjoy it. But tiredness only strikes me when I have finished some major work. I am satisfied with this concerto.”

Rachmaninov premiered his first concerto in 1892, accompanied by the Conservatoire Orchestra but he was not to play it again for the next 25 years. He rejected all requests to do so, saying that the work was not good enough. In 1908, he wrote to a friend: “I am planning to look through my first concerto to decide how much time and work is needed to write a new version, and whether it merits the effort. Naturally much of it needs totally rewriting because its orchestration is much worse than its music.” This revision only took place in 1917, a few months before the Russian Revolution and the composer's own emigration. By that time, he had reached his opus 39 and had several decades of experience under his belt as both composer and pianist. He examined this concerto critically and sat down to recompose it. However, although it is universally agreed that the revised version is vastly superior to the original, it has never really been able to emerge from the shadow cast by the 2nd and 3rd concertos.  In 1931, Rachmaninov wrote to a friend that: “If I look at my juvenile works, I can see precisely what is superfluous in them. I rewrote my first piano concerto and it is now truly decent. It has all the freshness of youth in it, and is far more accessible. And yet no one is interested. If I say in America that I will play my First Concerto, they don't exactly protest but I can see from their faces that they would rather I played the Second or Third. It is astonishing how much nonsense I wrote when I was 19. I think that is the case with every composer.”

The composition follows in the footsteps of the great romantic piano concertos and although we can detect the influence of Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Grieg's essays in the genre, it already bears the hallmarks of Rachmaninov's style with its almost unbearable outpouring of emotion welded to fiendish virtuosity. We tend to regard Rachmaninov as a conservative composer, because as an early 20th century composer he followed his own style rather than the aesthetic of the avant-garde. For those who hold easy novelty above sincerity, they should still be urged to look at the curious metre of the final movement the Rachmaninov First Concerto: its use of alternating metres was still very unusual even for music written in the 1910s.