Sunday Classics: Fun with Rachmaninoff's "Isle of the Dead"

Arnold Böcklin's original Isle of the Dead, from 1880. (You can click on it to enlarge.) The second Isle, painted later the same year, is housed in New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art.


"A great painting? Maybe not. And not exactly a blank canvas either. But blank enough to project your own meanings into the resonant rectangle that is Isle of the Dead."

-- Sara Fishko, in her June 3 "Fishko Files" report
on Rachmaninonff's symphonic poem Isle of the Dead

by Ken

On Friday morning's NPR Morning Edition presented a new segment of Sara Fishko's "Fishkko Files" series. Noting that the New York Philharmonic will be playing the Rachmaninoff symphonic poem this week under guest conductor David Robertson, Sara provided some really informative and atmospheric background on Isle of the Dead. which "was inspired by one of the most compelling visual images ever created." Included in the piece are interviews with appropriately chosen specialists (Sabine Rewald, a curator of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum; Steven Heller, a graphic-design specialist; and Diane Fremont, a Jungian analyst, an audio sampling of the 1945 Val Lewton film Isle of the Dead, and much more, not least excerpts from the Decca recording of Rachmaninoff's Isle by Vladimir Ashkenazy and the Royal Philharmonic.

One thing Sara couldn't do on the radio was actually show the Arnold Böcklin paintings of this name -- and yes, it's paintings, plural, since as she explained, the first one became so popular that Böcklin eventually painted four more -- but that problem is remedied in the online version, which even includes a slide show of all five. (You can also see them in Wikipedia's article on them.)

In the click-through we've got the "Fishko Files" report and an assortment of recordings of Rachmaninoff's symphonic poem.


FOR MORE OF ISLE OF THE DEAD, CLICK HERE



Rachmaninoff recorded Isle of the Dead in 1929 with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Here's the first half of the piece -- the conclusion is in the click-through.

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