Sergei Rachmaninoff

Exile reversed his life: a composer who played became a pianist who composed. Rachmaninoff left Russia at the end of 1917 with a solo repertoire he had never needed, built it under pressure, and became one of the most admired players of the century — while writing, across twenty-five remaining years, only six substantial works. The bulk of the catalogue precedes that. Born near Novgorod in 1873, he studied in St Petersburg and then in Moscow under the exacting discipline of Nikolai Zverev, with Siloti, Taneyev and Arensky after him; the one-act Aleko and the C sharp minor Prelude made him famous before he was twenty-one. The failure of the First Symphony in 1897 stopped him for three years, and the Second Piano Concerto that ended the silence carries a dedication to Nikolai Dahl. The Second Symphony, The Bells, the Third Concerto and the All-Night Vigil all belong to the Russian years. The late works — the Fourth Concerto, the Paganini Rhapsody, the Third Symphony and the Symphonic Dances of 1940 — are leaner, drier and harder in outline, and took the longest to find their audience. He died in California in 1943. He had left the Moscow Conservatoire at nineteen with the gold medal as pianist and composer, taught piano at the Mariinskaya School and within four years was conducting for Savva Mamontov's Moscow Private Russian Opera, later for two seasons at the Bolshoi Theatre. Three years in Dresden were given over entirely to composition, and a large tour of the United States as pianist and conductor came in 1909, eight years before the departure became permanent.