Symphony No 1: Isle of the Dead

After the disastrous failure of it's premiere in 1897, Rachmaninov's youthfully exuberant Symphony No. 1 had to wait until after his death before it was reconstructed from the surviving orchestral parts and performed again, in Moscow in 1945. Since then it has taken it's rightful place as one of the great Russian symphonic works of the late nineteenth century. The Isle of the Dead, Op. 29 is a vivid and powerful symphonic poem based on a well-known nineteenthcentury painting by the Swiss symbolist artist Arnold Bocklin.