Piano Concerto no. 4 in G minor, op. 40

Rachmaninoff finished the Fourth Concerto in 1926, in a decade dominated by Bartók, Stravinsky, Berg and Schoenberg, and the New York press greeted it as an echo of the nineteenth century. The verdict made him think about his position: he could not discard the old way of writing, he said, and could not acquire the new, which seemed to him to come from the head rather than the heart. He cut and revised the score twice, in the late 1920s and again in 1941. The dedication is to Nikolai Medtner. Rachmaninoff played the premiere himself in Philadelphia on 18 March 1927, with Leopold Stokowski conducting. Medtner returned the compliment, dedicating his own Second Piano Concerto to Rachmaninoff.