The composer and the autocrat - Chicago Reader

For over 25 years, beginning with George Gershwin Alone, Hershey Felder has been embodying the lives and art of famous composers onstage, including Chopin, Beethoven, and Tchaikovsky. And he’s always been alone, except for his piano.

That’s changed in his newest bio-musical, Rachmaninoff and the Tsar, now in its midwest premiere at Writers Theatre under the direction of Trevor Hay. As you might expect, Felder plays Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff. But he’s joined by Jonathan Silvestri as Tsar Nicholas II. The two men represent aspects of Russian culture that are at times convergent, at times divergent, but that, taken together, reveal their personal histories of loss as metaphors for the upheavals of the Russian revolution and the Soviet state.

Rachmaninoff and the Tsar
Through 9/21: Wed–Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2 PM; open captions Thu 9/4, Sat 8/30 2 PM ASL interpretation; Writers Theatre, 325 Tudor Ct., Glencoe, 847-242-6000, writerstheatre.org, $35-$95

It’s 1943, days before his 70th birthday, and Rachmaninoff, dying of melanoma in Beverly Hills, has summoned his memories and his former monarch in the midst of his morphine haze. The loss of his Russian home in the wake of the revolution led to a long dry spell as a composer, turning him into what Nicholas calls “a performing monkey,” playing his Steinway for American concert audiences. Felder (beautifully) plays excerpts of several Rachmaninoff compositions along the way, including the Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, which captures the somber majesty of the composer’s work and encapsulates in music the feelings of nostalgia and loss threaded throughout the show. (What we don’t hear is his Piano Concerto No. 3, or “Rach 3,” as it was called in the 1996 film Shine, based on the life of Australian pianist David Helfgott—a piece whose difficulty is, at least in the film, a contributing factor to Helfgott’s mental breakdown.)

There are also interesting historical tidbits along the way—I for one never knew about Rachmaninoff’s initial interest in Anna Anderson, the Polish woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia, youngest (and according to Nicholas, the favorite) of the tsar’s daughters. (Anderson’s story inspired the 1956 Ingrid Bergman film Anastasia.) Stefano DeCarli’s videos of the imperial family (in which Silvestri’s actual wife and daughter play Nicholas’s wife, Alexandra, and Anastasia) show the softer side of the Romanovs, and suggest that Nicholas, like Rachmaninoff, was happiest away from the world and in the womb of his family. (The loss of Rachmaninoff’s home in post-revolution exile in Switzerland, Villa Senar, as World War II broke out, also marked a great rupture in his creative output.)

Not all the narrative strands mesh well, but the presence of Nicholas gives Felder’s Rachmaninoff a foil and a symbol of what he loved and hated about his homeland. But the composer found love for his adopted country of the United States as well, even doing his own arrangement of the “Star-Spangled Banner.” Felder plays it at the end. Hearing it right after the president of the United States literally rolled out the red carpet for another Russian autocrat left me with my own sense of displacement and unease.