There’s a writerly trope that Blaise Pascal used to sign off his longer letters with something along the lines of “excuse the length of this letter, I didn’t have time to write a shorter one.” What does this have to do with Sergei Rachmaninoff? Admittedly very little. But this often misattributed quip might help explain the difference between the length of the score Rachmaninoff intended for his Piano Concerto No.3, and the much shorter length of his initial performances of this incredibly verbose and laborious work. And why so verbose? Put yourself in the composers shoes for a moment: your Piano Concerto No.2 was a near-instantaneous hit, the slow movement of which is a miraculously tender elegy so rarely captured within the concerto literature, and you even managed to pull off the gimmick of a church-bell motif right from the outset. How do you follow up on that and get lightning to strike twice? You can’t — a truly infectious melody like that of No.2’s Preghiera is a once-in-a-lifetime hook-up. You’d have to go in a completely different direction altogether and, as Rachmaninoff did, land on an impossibly virtuosic and technically precipitous script for the soloist’s part. Perhaps the composer realised he went too far in this direction and, shuffling from his writing desk into the pianist’s bench, had to scale things back a little.