#provo

So in the back end of 1938, Rachmaninoff was finally going back to Utah after over a decade. What's even cooler is that this time, the city of Provo and NOT SLC had the privilege of hosting his concert, even though he was going to Utah's capital. He was 65 years old at the time. I think I've got a few images from that year:

With his wife and the Medtners in London, having tea in the garden at Senar in Switzerland, and working in the garden at Senar.

The concert was to be on December 5, 1938, with the following program (which he had recently played at Carnegie Hall):

By Jean-Phillipe Rameau: Gavotte & 6 Doubles in A Minor (from Pièces de Clavecin, Book 3)

By Johann Sebastian Bach Toccata in E Minor BWV 914

By Ludwig van Beethoven: Piano Sonata №26 in E♭ Major Opus 81a (Les Adieux)

By Franz Schubert: Impromptu and Rondo ~a break~

By himself: Prélude №5 in G Major Opus 32

By Fryderyk Chopin: Préludes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, 19, 22, 23, 16, Opus 28

By Franz Liszt: one of the Petrarch Sonnets S. 161 (from Années de Pèlerinage 2); Tarantella S. 162/3 (from Venezia e Napoli)

The instrument he was playing was actually his own piano, which was something he was in the habit of doing (taking his own instrument to concert venues). He signed a lifetime contract with Steinway & Sons upon arriving in the United States in 1918 and would start almost exclusively using their instruments.

The venue of the performance would be the Provo Tabernacle (now the Provo City Center Temple), and tickets weren't sold, but attendance was limited to BYU students and people who with season tickets to the BYU Community Concert Association series that year. It's said that this was one of the rare occasions on which "Mormon Standard Time" was disregarded and people arrived early instead of late.

Rachmaninoff was, it seems, prone to some stage fright, so upon entering the stage, he didn't acknowledge the (very warm) applause and walked slowly to his piano. The man's demeanor at the piano is also very distinctive (and, I think, similar to my own)—his face would bear no expression, but according to that night's edition of the Evening Herald, "Ripping with uncanny dexterity, Rachmaninoff wove musical glories into technically intricate passages of which only those who watched those groomed hands fly might best be aware."

Philip Clark recalls that his father attended the concert, who said Rachmaninoff put on a pair of electric gloves during the intermission to keep his hands warm for the second half of the concert. As somebody who lives in a cold house, I can verify that it's harder to play the piano with cold fingers. Philip's older brother Homer was also in attendance and obtained two artifacts from this intermission: Rachmaninoff's coffee cup and the saucer onto which he tapped the ashes of a cigarette (that he probably wasn't supposed to have, but he was a chain smoker since his 20s lol).

However, the concert was interrupted at one point by a train named Leaping Lena, pulling into the Orem Inter-Urban, bells sounding not as a "ding, ding, ding," but a "clang, clang, clang." Accounts vary at this point: Rachmaninoff either held his hands over the keyboard or folded his arms until Leaping Lena pulled into the station and the incessant clanging of the bells stopped, then resumed exactly where he had stopped.

Upon playing the last note, Rachmaninoff seems to have stalked off the stage without so much as a hint of a smile, but the audience broke into what the Salt Lake Tribune called "tumultuous and insistent applause" lasting for a full 2.5 minutes. Returning for acknowledgements twice, Rachmaninoff then played (probably without much enthusiasm) his Prélude №2 in C♯ Minor Opus 3, and I know you know which one it is. By that point, the piece had become so popular and he'd played it so much that he was quite tired of it and had tried unsuccessfully to improvise on the work for encores.

Once that had been finished, Rachmaninoff is said to have disappeared from the stage, left the Tabernacle almost immediately, and left, perhaps that very day, for his next concert in Minneapolis.