Symphony no. 2 in E minor, op. 27

Rachmaninoff dedicated his Second Symphony to one of his teachers, the composer Sergei Taneyev. The score moves between lyrical, dramatic and epic impulses, allowing the expansive Russian Romantic line to unfold on a truly symphonic scale.

He composed it in 1906–07 in Dresden, where he had moved with his family in order to write undisturbed and away from the unrest at home, and where The Isle of the Dead and the First Piano Sonata followed. The premiere of the First Symphony under Glazunov ten years earlier had left him doubting that he could write symphonies at all; he conducted the first performance of the Second in St Petersburg on 8 February 1908 and gave it in Moscow less than a month later, and its success settled the doubt.