Word: rachmaninoff
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Thirty-four years ago a gaunt young Russian with a crew haircut took over the job as chief conductor in the orchestra pit of Moscow's Imperial Grand Theatre. Muscovite socialites liked the way he conducted. But Sergei Rachmaninoff had other fish to fry. Not only was he Russia's best pianist, but also the composer of three operas, a symphony, two piano concertos and a sheaf of smaller and more popular operas. One of these, the "Flatbush" Prelude in C Sharp Minor, had already swept the world, made his name a byword among people who never went...
Year later Rachmaninoff gave up opera conducting, spent his leisure time writing more symphonies and piano concertos. In 1909 he began touring the U. S. as a pianist. Only two or three times, during his first few years in the U. S., did he take up the baton again, and then chiefly to conduct his own works...
Last week, at Philadelphia's Academy of Music, tall, stoop-shouldered, 66-year-old Rachmaninoff stood on the conductor's platform for the first time in 30 years, earnestly rowed the Philadelphia Orchestra through two of his weightiest works. One was his Third and latest Symphony, the other his 45-minute-long choral symphony The Bells, which needs a 200-man chorus as well as a 100-man orchestra to boom out its melodious refrain. For several days he had given up piano practice to brush up his conducting technique. Said he: "Playing the piano and conducting...
...huge audience that stormed the Academy of Music to hear him found that Rachmaninoff was still pretty good at both, listened reverently while he poked thunderbolts out of the kettledrums and beckoned concords of sweet snarls from the banked fiddles. Two days later he repeated the performance in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall...
When it was all over, weary-looking Rachmaninoff was glad to get back to his Manhattan apartment, where he could finger his piano again undisturbed, smoke his constant de-nicotinized cigarets in peace...