Nicolas Namoradze: Memories of Rachmaninoff's Georgian Song (2022)
Nicolas Namoradze, piano
Recorded live at the International Keyboard Institute and Festival, NYC, July 2023
Find the score in hard copy and download versions: muse-press.com/en/product-tag...
Memories of Rachmaninoff’s Georgian Song was written for Rachmaninoff’s sesquicentennial celebrations. It is based on an early song of his, Oh, do not sing for me, Op. 4 No. 4, set to a poem by Pushkin and known as the “Georgian Song.” The song’s expressively winding and melismatic opening, highly reminiscent of Georgian folk music yet an original creation of Rachmaninoff’s, introduces the following verse:
Do not sing for me, my beauty,
Your sad Georgian songs of yore;
For they wake deep from my memory
Another life and a distant shore.
Memories of Rachmaninoff’s Georgian Song is neither an arrangement nor a paraphrase, but rather the musical equivalent of a faint, dreamlike recollection - an allusion to the topic of the original song itself. The work opens with a sparse figuration where strains of the song’s melody are occasionally suggested, as if from far away. A gradual thickening of the texture leads to a more recognizable utterance of Rachmaninoff’s thematic material before the work retreats back into the realm of distant memory.