Word: pianos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...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 near a concert hall...
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...
...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 don't go together. It takes too much time to become good at either...
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...
...same date at the old Red Hall in B Street, two blocks from the Finn Hall. Twenty-five Communists appeared for the dance, huddled in the hall while a crowd of some 400 battered down the door, pulled siding off the walls, tore out the plumbing, smashed the piano, burned pictures of Stalin and Browder when talked out of burning down the hall. The 25 inside escaped unhurt through a rear door. Two blocks away the Finnish meeting went off quietly...