Presents
Nikolai Tchérépnine
"Dacha" for Violin, Cello and Piano, Op.38 No.4
Nikolai Tchérépnine (1873-1945) was born in St. Petersburg. He took a law degree at the university there before entering the Conservatory where he studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. By 1909, he was teaching there and held the position of professor. Among his many students was Sergei Prokofiev. He also became a well-known conductor, serving as Diagliev's conductor of his Ballet Russes in Paris. After the Russian Revolution, he moved to Paris where he continued to work as a conductor.
Dacha or The Country House Trio is taken from his 14 Esquisses sur les images d'un alphabet russe d Alexandre Benois originally for piano. The fourteen sketches based on images by Alexander Benois from the Russian alphabet was published in 1910 as his Op.38, but probably was completed a few years before that when he was working with Benois, from 1903 to 1907 on the production of the ballet Amida’s Pavilion, which premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1907. Benois was a Russian theater art director and painter and his drawings associated with letters from the Russian alphabet greatly impressed Tcherepnin. Dacha, the Russian for country house, served as the sketch for the fourth letter of the alphabet.
Most well to do Russians spent their winters in either St Petersburg or Moscow but retreated to their country homes for the summer. Russian writers such as Turgenev. Chekhov and Tolstoy wrote many stories describing the idyllic life at such places. The arrangement for piano trio, even better than that for the piano alone, evokes the image of a gentle warm summer’s day in the country, perhaps sitting on the veranda, looking out at the fields.
An evocative, beautiful work. Long out of print, it is a pleasure to make it available again.
Parts: $15.95
