Product Description: Funeral Games in Honor of Arthur Vincent Lourié explores the varied aesthetic impulses and ever-evolving personal motivations of Russian composer Arthur Lourié. A St. Petersburg native allied with the Futurist movement and profoundly sympathetic to Silver Age decadence, Lourié was swept away by the Revolution; he surfaced as a Communist commissar of music before landing in Europe and America, where his career foundered...read more

Product Description: This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curated for quality. Quality assurance was conducted on each of these books in an attempt to remove books with imperfections introduced by the digitization process. Though we have made best efforts - the books may have occasional errors that do not impede the reading experience...read more

Product Description: Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Product Description: Dmitri Shoshtakovich (1906-1975) is recognized as one of the greatest composers of the twentieth century yet few people know that he was also an outstanding concert pianist who maintained a hectic performing schedule. In Dmitri Shostakovich, Pianist Sofia Moshevich offers the first detailed examination of Shoshtakovich the pianist within the context of his life and work as a composer...read more

Considers how Joseph Stalin's unpredictable persecution of artists influenced the life and work of the avant-garde composer, tracing Shostakovich's struggles to remain faithful to his music in spite of attacks on his contemporaries and Stalin's contradictory banning and support of his work. 20,000 first printing. (view table of contents)

In reminiscences spanning his entire life, the musical titan of Soviet Russia recalls musicians, artists, and writers, conversations with Stalin, and seesawing ideologies and reveals himself as a tormented artist working under the most difficult conditions

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This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ...for the creation of diverse rhythmic streams, for the composition of music that depends on its melodic, harmonic and contrapuntal interests. How infinitely more at home he is when writing for the piano! But here he is content to remain entirely conservative, and anything in the nature of novelty is indeed far to seek. As a composer for his own instrument he is relatively a classicist, for one cannot, in days when music is almost universally accepted as primarily a medium of expression, continue to reserve this category for the pre-Beethovenians, and in styling Rakhmaninof an old-fashioned romanticist, one has in mind a differentiation between the real modernist, who makes no apology for boldly attempting illustration by means of music, and the nineteenth-century romanticist of the Schumann or Chopin type who, from our point of view, is to be considered as having merely hinted, and sometimes a little faint-heartedly, at the emancipation of music and its enfranchisement as a highly expressive art. In the smaller piano pieces, of which Rakhmaninof has composed a large number, he writes in a variety of moods and styles. At times he is meditative, as in the B major Prelude (No. 11) from the series Opus 32, on occasion almost feminine in delicacy, as in the fifth item of the same set; although he rarely approaches the uncompromising' popularness' of the Polka, which forms part of the Album inaugurating the Russian Music Publishing Company's Edition, the G minor Prelude from the group of ten (Opus 23), dedicated to Siloti, is quite fairly to be described as a concession to those who prefer the lighter kind of music; examples are to be found in which there is a greater ruggedness than in Brahms, though falling short of the rather savage emotionalism of...

Product Description: Nikolay Andreyevich Rimsky-Korsakov was probably one of the most significant composers in Russia in the 19th century. Largely self taught - he trained as a naval officer - he is best known for three orchestra works: "Sheherazade", the "Spanish Capriccio" and "Russian Easter"...read more

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Product Description: Written with enthusiasm and accessible prose , the Classic fM Lifelines series will become the Everyman o f musical biographies. Titles for the series have been chose n from the Classic fM''s own listener surveys of the most pop ular composers. '

Product Description: A biography of Sergey Prokofiev, one of Russia'a most famous and enduring composers, whose music was not recognised in his own country until after his death.

Product Description: Book by Prokofiev, Sergei