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Celebrating California Institute of the Arts’ 50th Anniversary
lived in his new house for only a few months before he died of cancer on March 28, 1943. His funeral was held in the tiny Russian Orthodox Church on Micheltorena Street in Silver Lake, whose incongruous onion domes rise today above the crush of traffic on the 101 Freeway.
When Rachmaninoff moved to Los Angeles, he was much better known in America than Stravinsky—or Schoenberg. In planning the animated musical feature that became Fantasia, Walt Disney at first envisioned Rachmaninoff playing his Second Piano Concerto. “I don’t know anything about music,” Disney is alleged to have told Leopold Stokowski, longtime conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, “but I have heard of Rachmaninoff for a long time.” In the end, Rachmaninoff never worked on any Hollywood projects, but his late romantic style was widely imitated in film scores, and his music was used in numerous films, including Vincente Minelli’s The Story of Three Loves (featuring the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini) and David Lean’s Brief Encounter (Second Piano Concerto).
Rachmaninoff’s social circle in Los Angeles consisted mainly of other émigrés, mostly Russian. The Stravinskys lived nearby and received an invitation to dinner. At that historic meeting of two of the greatest Russian composers of all time, the conversation (according to Bertensson) dealt not with important aesthetic questions, however, but rather with nuts-and-bolts matters of the American music business, especially concert bureaus and royalties. “A few days later,” writes Stravinsky’s biographer Stephen Walsh, “Rachmaninoff arrived on his colleague’s doorstep with a huge jar of honey, a product for which Stravinsky had confessed a liking.”
A devout Russian Orthodox believer, Rachmaninoff was known for his generosity to those in need. When his longtime friend, stage and film actor/director/ pedagogue Michael Chekhov (nephew of playwright Anton Chekhov), who had emigrated to the USA in 1935, was facing financial ruin in New York, Rachmaninoff spared no expense in helping to bring him to Hollywood, where Chekhov found work and stability.
Chekhov was deeply touched by Rachmaninoff’s kindness, extended when the composer was already seriously ill. “I kept waiting for the day when I could personally thank him for his indispensable help,” wrote Chekhov in his memoirs, “but he was quickly slipping away, and I did not have the opportunity to see him. Just a few days before his death, I did manage to send him a short note and a bouquet of red roses. I thanked him in my thoughts when I kissed his cold, beautiful hand at the funeral service in the small Russian church.”
—HARLOW ROBINSON
THE STORY THAT DEFINED A GENERATION. AN UNMISSABLE WORLD PREMIERE.
In Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1967, the hardened hearts and aching souls of Ponyboy Curtis, Johnny Cade and their chosen family of ‘outsiders’ are in a fight for survival and a quest for purpose in a world that may never accept them. A story of the bonds that brothers share and the hopes we all hold on to, this gripping new musical reinvigorates the timeless tale of ‘haves and have nots’, of protecting what’s yours and fighting for what could be.
BEGINS FEB 19
TICKETS WILL SELL OUT! PRODUCTION