Sergei Rachmaninoff’s second Piano Concerto in C Minor stands on its own as a masterpiece of the late Romantic period, but what a great idea it turned out to be, to pair it with David Lean’s classic love story of 1945, Brief Encounter.
It was Lean’s collaborator, producer Noël Coward, on whose one-act play the film was based, who insisted on the use of his favourite piece of music, despite there being a composer, Muir Mathieson, waiting in the wings to write an original score. With all due respect to Mathieson and however his score might have turned out, the use of Rachmaninoff, played by Australian pianist Eileen Joyce and the National Symphony Orchestra, raised the film’s emotional level sky-high.
The film is told in flashback, as the lead character of Laura (Celia Johnson) sits in her living room with her husband, staring into space, listening to the Second Concerto and thinking about her time with another man, Alec (Trevor Howard). She remembers the day they met, at the café in the train station. When a piece of grit gets in her eye, Alec, a doctor, removes it, and a bond starts between them, quickly developing into love as they embark on a series of clandestine assignations.
This love story is doomed, of course, as Laura is a married mother and we are deep in the territory of 1940s middle-class manners. Granted, the strait-jacketed morals and linguistic quirks of the times leave us in no doubt that the film is a period piece, but it rightly remains a hugely popular British movie.
The development, and inevitable demise, of the relationship is subtly underpinned by the repeating strains of Rachmaninoff’s music. The enduring popularity of his piece, meanwhile, is demonstrated by its consistently topping the Classic FM Hall of Fame, firmly securing its status as Britain’s favourite piece of classical music. Watch and listen to a pleasing montage of Brief Encounter to Rachmaninoff’s music below:
