In between nine performances, or maybe it was twelve, of Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto, "I've Always Loved You" concerns itself with the silliest three people of recent screen history. If it had been played by the Marx Bros., the picture might have had a certain drollness. As it is, played in grim earnest by Philip Dorn, Catherine McLeod, and William Carter, it is slightly hideous.

Dorn plays Leopold Goronoff, as great a conductor and pianist as his name would suggest, and personally accounts for fourteen of the twenty-three Rachmaninoff tidbits. He discovers a budding young pianistic genius on a Pennsylvania farm in the person of Myra Hassman, who plays the Concerto twenty-seven times and addresses Goronoff incessantly as "Maestro." At her New York debut she plays guess what too well to suit Goronoff's touchy ego, so they split and she marries a Pennsylvania farmer who's Almost as good and kind as he is stupid. After a number of obvious events masquerading as developments, one of which has Myra's daughter play the thirty-third excerpt from the Concerto, Myra discovers that she doesn't love Concnoff after all but has always a loved her husband. Careful observers yesterday noted the resemblance between this sentiment and the picture's title.

Thanks to Arthur Rubinstein's recording of the sound tract, the thirty-eight versions of the Concerto and of some Chopin and Wagner all sound at their brilliant best. But forty-seven hearings of a work, part of which was identified by latter-day musicians in the audience as "Full Moon and Empty Arms," is too much for even the most insistent Raclunauaninof fan. Or maybe it was fifty-two.