It’s rare to discover a lost work by a master composer, but ‘new’ works by Classical-era composers do turn up in the archives. To discover a lost work by a famous 20th-century composer is even more unexpected, but that was the case with Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Orchestral Suite in D minor.
The young Sergei Rachmaninoff
Written while he was a student at the Moscow Conservatoire under Alexander Siloti, the work was given the highest rating by his teacher. Rachmaninoff then sent the work to Pyotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky in St. Petersburg, and that is where this story stops for over a century. Tchaikovsky was busy preparing for his New York debut, conducting the New York Music Society’s orchestra at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall. The work was given to a servant and then vanished forever.
One of the problems of the work was that it was written for orchestral forces greater than the Moscow Conservatoire could muster. To get a performance, Rachmaninoff created a piano version of the work. It was this version that was discovered in the papers of his teacher, Alexander Siloti, and that was eventually identified as a work by Rachmaninoff. More to the point, Rachmaninoff always declared that the work should be performed in its orchestral form.
Alexander Siloti (L) and Rachmaninoff (R), ca 1922 (The Etude magazine, May 1822)
We spoke with pianist Teodor Doré about his upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Concert Hall, where his orchestration of the extant piano reduction will have its world premiere on 12 November.
Teodor Doré (Photo by Bruce Basudde)
Rachmaninoff’s great-granddaughter, Alexandra Conus Rachmaninoff, gave her blessing to Teodor for the preparation of an orchestration from the extant piano score. The problem with the piano score was that it was somewhat more minimal than expected, and it wasn’t just a matter of orchestrating and filling out the piano voices. In the fourth movement, for example, the left hand had only octave pitches while the right hand took the melody – all the inner voices had been stripped away. This is where Doré’s familiarity with both the work and Rachmaninoff’s music came to the fore. The entire orchestration project took nearly 2 years to complete, and it is on 12 November at Carnegie Hall we will hear the result.
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Suite in D Minor: IV. Allegro (Ekaterina Litvintseva, piano)
For the last several years, Doré has been involved in the Renaissance-21 movement, of which he was a co-founder. Renaissance-21 looks to the past to create ‘A cultural movement dedicated to re-centring human creativity and reunifying art, science, philosophy, and technology in pursuit of deeper meaning, beauty, and cultural renewal in the 21st century’. This has involved not only concerts but also work on the documentary film, Rachmaninoff: The Lost Suite, filmed by filmmaker Victoria Pakhomova (Teodor Doré’s wife). This starts with the 17-year-old Rachmaninoff sending his suite off to Tchaikovsky, its loss by a servant, and the 2002 rediscovery of the piano score by musicologist Valentin Antipov. There’s currently a fundraising campaign for the film (https://www.gofundme.com/f/rachmaninoff-the-lost-suite-documentary-film).
The group has just finished its Renaissance-21 Festival in London, which ran from 22 September to 22 October 22, and included a recital by Teodor Doré of his piano miniatures, Les Reflets dorés; a harp recital at the National Liberal Club of music by Sophia Corri Dussek, Tomas Marson, and John Marson; a concert by the Holtág Quartet of 4 centuries of British music from Thomas Linley the Younger through Elizabeth Maconchy; and other concerts and discussions.
The concert at Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall opens with Doré’s own reflection on the composers with whom the Renaissance-21 project has been working. His work, The Titans of Renaissance, is dedicated to the great figures of the past. The program also includes Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, arias by Gounod, Dvořák, and Lehár, and other music from composers from Mexico, Russia, the UK, Austria, and closes with Rachmaninoff’s reconstructed Suite in D minor. There will be 4 world premieres and 2 US premieres on the program. The MidAtlantic Philharmonic Orchestra from Maryland, conducted by Jason Tramm and Olsi Qinami, will perform.
With the premiere of the lost Rachmaninoff piece, we can start to add more detail to Rachmaninoff’s early years, and Doré’s work will help us to fill out the composer’s work with the masters of both the Moscow and St. Petersburg Conservatories. It’s a concert to look forward to!
Ticket link: https://www.carnegiehall.org/calendar/2026/11/12/midatlantic-philharmonic-orchestra-0730pm
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