On the 18th of November, 1915, a recital was held in Moscow to commemorate the life of Alexander Scriabin, whose premature death in April of that year had rocked the world of Russian music. The program consisted entirely of his own works, and performing them at the piano was fellow Moscow Conservatory graduate, Sergei Rachmaninoff. read more…
I can’t speak from experience, but I bet the first half of the 20th century was a God awful time to be living. It was a time when war and economic crisis scathed the face of humanity. (Actually, we haven’t come very far in this respect.) It also was a time when so much about art and its dissemination was necessarily political, and that is a terrible thing. read more…