Three Minutes from an Hour

Track fifteen ended on a waltz that everybody knows without knowing why. Track sixteen we leave alone, for now.

Deux Guitares is the only track on the standard edition credited to Garrett as composer, with John Haywood. This series asks what has carried old music this far, and a new piece hasn’t had time to go anywhere yet. We’ll come back to it in a few years.

So, track seventeen. One loose end from fifteen first. We said the 1997 Anna Karenina soundtrack was Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. The Rachmaninoff in it is a hymn from his Vespers. It isn’t this.

The facts. Track seventeen runs three minutes and twenty-six seconds. It is the third movement, Adagio, of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor, Op. 27. The credit is the one from track fifteen: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.

St Petersburg, 1897. Rachmaninoff’s First Symphony has its premiere, with Alexander Glazunov conducting. It is a disaster.

The composer takes it badly. For the next few years he writes very little.

In the autumn of 1906 he moves his family to Dresden, away from Moscow. Between October and the following April he writes a second symphony, mostly in secret.

In January 1908 he conducts its premiere himself, in St Petersburg, at the Mariinsky. This time it works.

The symphony is dedicated to Sergei Taneyev. Later that year it wins him his second Glinka Award.

The third movement opens in the violins. Then a clarinet takes a melody and doesn’t let go. The Boston Symphony’s programme note counts twenty-three bars of it. Gramophone calls it an “endless cantilena”.

In 1976 Eric Carmen built a pop song on it, Never Gonna Fall in Love Again. It reached number eleven in the United States and number one in Canada.

The single just before it, All by Myself, came from Rachmaninoff too: the Second Piano Concerto.

In Garrett’s arrangement the clarinet’s tune belongs to the violin. Track eleven gave a song without words a singer. Track seventeen gives a clarinet’s song to a violinist.

Now the odd part. A symphony with a successful premiere and a prize then spent decades being played short.

Uncut, it lasts about an hour. Conductors brought it down to as little as thirty-five minutes. Josef Stránský, Mahler’s successor at the New York Philharmonic, claimed to have approval for twenty-nine cuts.

Twenty-nine cuts.

The first recording, Nikolai Sokoloff’s in 1928, lasts forty-six minutes. The second movement lost almost a third of itself. The Adagio was trimmed too.

The biographer Geoffrey Norris wrote that the work’s true stature was “obscured for decades”.

It was the 1970s before orchestras routinely played every bar. The recording usually credited with the change is André Previn’s with the London Symphony Orchestra, in 1973.

Garrett’s track lasts three minutes and twenty-six seconds. The Adagio on its own usually runs well over ten minutes.

It isn’t a cut in the old sense. Nobody is passing this off as the symphony. The credit says so: Arr.

Track fourteen was a minuet that the first print left out. Track seventeen comes from a symphony that people kept, and kept cutting.

Rachmaninoff is no stranger to Garrett’s discography. The Vocalise is on Classic Romance. The eighteenth variation from the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is on Legacy. The Second Concerto is on Garrett vs. Paganini. The Prelude in C-sharp minor is on Alive.

On his published repertoire list, the Second Symphony appears only under Immortal.

This record keeps doing it. A famous name arrives, and the famous pieces are already on earlier albums. So Garrett went to the symphony, the one Rachmaninoff wrote after the first one failed.

This series keeps asking what carries music past the people who made it.

Track fifteen said a piece can become famous before it gets its right name. Track seventeen is a symphony that came through sixty years of scissors and is still here.

So listen to track seventeen as three and a half minutes from an hour. The other fifty-six are still there whenever you want them.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as printed by Deutsche Grammophon (8 October 2026) and david-garrett.com, where Deux Guitares is credited to David Garrett and John Haywood; the composition, Dresden, the premiere, the dedication and the Glinka Award from the reference literature on the symphony and the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s programme note; the clarinet melody from the BSO note and Gramophone; the cuts, Stránský, Sokoloff, Norris and Previn from David Gutman’s survey of the recordings in Gramophone (2015); Never Gonna Fall in Love Again and its chart positions from the published chart record; the Anna Karenina soundtrack from the London Records track list (455 360-2); Garrett’s Rachmaninoff recordings from david-garrett.com. We don’t say which bars of the Adagio Garrett keeps, because the credit doesn’t say.