Kalamazoo Philharmonia – Sounds of Silence

The plot of this independent film, slated for a premiere in 2022, revolves around a pianist at an international competition and her struggles with the pressures of her art. Besides being in the film’s climactic scene, the Philharmonia and stunning pianist Natalia Kazaryan also recorded the main piece of the soundtrack: Rachmaninoff’s beloved 2nd Piano Concerto. This particular work was chosen for the movie because it was the first work of the composer after a long compositional drought brought on by bad reviews of his First Symphony, mirroring the struggles of the character herself. So while the Rachmaninoff followed a period of silence, the works on the first half preceded silence in some way: the towering (but ambiguous) passacaglia from Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth was the opera that resulted in his first Soviet censure, while Sibelius’s searing, super-concentrated 7th Symphony, despite being written at the height of his powers, ended up being his last statement in the form. Sibelius could not bear the pressure of his success, burned the manuscript of a nearly complete 8th Symphony, and composed very little for the rest of his long life.