Rachmaninoff

Photo by James Fortune

I heard a piano piece on WCVE here in Richmond, it was played by Kiril Gersten, and it was one Rachmaninoff wrote when he was seventeen. It had some interesting chords, but was generally a nice sweet work, very romantic.

Once I read that he dominated the soundtrack industry in Los Angeles, and as a consequence, had a huge subtle influence on the vast movie-going public, who grew up hearing his variations on classic symphonies he wrote and new pieces.

The Raspberrie's "All By Myself" owes heavily to Rachmaninoff, and you could hear with in the piano piece this morning classic rock/pop construction, it sounded at times like "You Never Give Me Your Money." I could just hear Paul playing the bass line, and singing one of the melody lines, it's all there.

"Because," "A Whiter Shade of Pale," and many other classics are directly lifted from classical works, respectively Beethoven and Bach, if I'm not mistaken.