Symphony no. 3 in A minor, op. 44

Rachmaninoff returned to the symphony after nearly thirty years, writing the Third at Senar, the Swiss villa he built in 1930 to compensate for the lost summers at Ivanovka. An exile deprived of musical roots, traditions and native soil, he said, keeps no desire to create. Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra gave the premiere in November 1936 to a cool reception, and the composer revised the score in 1938. Three movements rather than four, with the scherzo folded into the central Adagio, and the Dies irae again at the close.