Op 32 no 5 rachmaninoff biography full

Sergey Vasil'evich Rakhmaninov 1 April [ O. He was one of the finest pianists of his day and, as a composer, very nearly the last great representative of Russian late Romanticism in classical music. He made it a point to use his own skills as a performer to explore fully the expressive possibilities of the instrument. Even in his earliest works, he revealed a sure grasp of idiomatic piano writing and a striking gift for melody.

Rachmaninoff was born in in Semyonovo, near Veliky Novgorod , in north-western Russia. He was born into a noble family of Tatar descent, who had been in the service of the Russian tsars since the 16th century. His parents were both amateur pianists. When he was four, his mother gave him casual piano lessons, [ 6 ] but it was his paternal grandfather, Arkady Alexandrovich Rachmaninoff, who brought Anna Ornatskaya, a teacher from Saint Petersburg , to teach Sergei in Ornatskaya remained for "two or three years", until the family home had to be sold to settle debts and the Rachmaninoffs moved to Moscow.

Rachmaninoff op 32 no 10

Sergei studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory before moving alone to Moscow to study piano under Nikolai Zverev and Alexander Siloti who was his cousin and a former student of Franz Liszt. He also studied harmony under Anton Arensky and counterpoint under Sergei Taneyev. Rachmaninoff was found to be quite lazy, failing most of his classes, and it was the strict regime of the Zverev home that instilled discipline in the boy.

In his early years, he showed great skill in composition. While still a student, he wrote the one-act opera , Aleko , for which he was awarded a gold medal in composition, his First Piano Concerto , and a set of piano pieces, Morceaux de fantaisie Op. The composer later became annoyed by the public's fascination with this piece, composed when he was 19 years old.