22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Rachmaninoff Reborn' Review: A Russian in the New World on PBS
Russia never gets enough credit for its generosity, having donated so many of the best and brightest to the rest of the world for well over a century. Nabokov, Nureyev, Solzhenitsyn, countless Ukrainians, my friend Zach on the Upper West Side—they've all fled the Soviet and post-Soviet realms, enriching the rest of the world in countless ways. Among the more prominent of these exiles is the subject of 'Rachmaninoff Reborn,' which is partly biographical and partly about how the New World forged a new man out of one of the Old World's greatest composers.
As related in the latest episode of 'Now Hear This'—the now-six-season-old series hosted by violinist Scott Yoo and an always entertaining entrée to classical music—Sergei Rachmaninoff was born into affluence in 1873, and became a New Yorker after fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. This is shorthand: The globe-trotting Rachmaninoff, the last of the great Russian romantic composers, made a circuitous route to America after leaving home. But he did, at age 44, reinvent himself as a concert pianist and became one of the most successful performing artists of the early 20th century. That itself is no small thing.
