Ave Maria (Bach/Schubert/Gounod)

Ave Maria is a popular and much-recorded setting of the Latin text Ave Maria, originally published in 1853 as Méditation sur le Premier Prélude de Piano de S. Bach.

The piece consists of a melody by the French Romantic composer Charles Gounod especially designed to be superimposed over the Prelude No. 1 in C major, BWV 846, from Book I of J.S. Bach's The Well-Tempered Clavier, written some 137 years earlier. Although published in instrumental versions and fitted to various texts during Gounod's lifetime, the claim that he never 'wrote' it appears to be literally true.Alongside Schubert's Ave Maria (another contrafactum), the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria has become a fixture at wedding masses, funerals and quinceañeras. There are many different instrumental arrangements including for violin and guitar, string quartet, piano solo, cello, and even trombones. Opera singers, such as Luciano Pavarotti, as well as choirs have recorded it hundreds of times during the twentieth century.Gounod's father-in-law Pierre-Joseph-Guillaume Zimmermann transcribed the improvisation and in 1853 made an arrangement for violin (or cello) with piano and harmonium. The same year it appeared with the words of Alphonse de Lamartine's poem Le livre de la vie ("The Book of Life") In 1859 Jacques Léopold Heugel published a version with the familiar Latin text. The version of Bach's prelude used by Gounod has the addition of one measure (m.23), found only in the Schwenke manuscript and the Simrock printed edition based upon it, but not in the other Bach manuscripts or the scholarly Bischoff and G. Henle Verlag Urtext printed editions.

Later in his career, Gounod composed an unrelated setting of Ave Maria for a four-part SATB choir.

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Rachmaninov Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18, is a concerto for piano and orchestra composed by Sergei Rachmaninoff between the autumn of 1900 and April 1901. The second and third movements were first performed with the composer as soloist on 2 December 1900. The complete work was premiered, again with the composer as soloist, on 9 November 1901, with his cousin Alexander Siloti conducting.

The work is scored for 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B♭ (I mov.) and A (II & III mov.), 2 bassoons, 4 horns in F, 2 trumpets in B♭, 3 trombones (2 tenor, 1 bass), tuba, timpani, bass drum, cymbals, solo piano, and strings. It is written in three-movement concerto form.

I.Moderato: C minor

II.Adagio sostenuto – Più animato – Tempo I: C minor → E major

III.Allegro scherzando: E major → C minor → C major