![]() Photo illustration by Jeff Curnow/Wikimedia Commons//Library of Congress Rachmaninoff (top) briefly joined a troupe of travelling Japanese acrobats. ![]() ![]() It was only a clash with a powerful London promoter that caused Rachmaninoff, born on this day in 1873, to return to his piano and music desk for good. According to a team of researchers at Harbeson University in Delaware, Rachmaninoff's mid-20s were spent not in semi-seclusion at a series of dachas, as his biographers have claimed, but on the well-trod boards of English music halls, where he performed some of the era's most amazing feats of strength. New scholarship has discovered a fascinating chapter in the life of the multitalented musician and a fresh set of answers to the perplexing questions of his youthful artistic decline and revival. But he did, a well-documented three-year fallow period after the dismal premiere of his First Symphony, during which he performed little and wrote even less. Listen to Sergei Rachmaninoff's sweeping, luxuriantly Romantic music - his Second Symphony, his Second Piano Concerto - and it's hard to imagine that this towering figure of 20th century music ever had a crisis of confidence. Photo illustration by Jeff Curnow/Wikimedia Commons/Library of CongressĮditor's note on April 4, 2016: You may have figured this out already - this story was an April Fools' joke. A London critic wrote, "It was such a spectacle as has rarely been seen anywhere in the Empire." After his First Symphony flopped, Sergei Rachmaninoff briefly switched careers.
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