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Alexander Tcherepnin: The Saga of a Russian Emigre Composer.

Article Excerpt
Alexander Tcherepnin: The Saga of a Russian Emigre Composer. By Ludmila Korabelnikova. Translated by Anna Winestein. Edited by Sue-Ellen Hershman-Tcherepnin. (Russian Music Studies.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. [xvi, 264 p. ISBN-13: 9780253349385. $39.95.] Illustrations, music examples, bibliographic references, index, discography.

Although not as well known as some of his contemporaries, Alexander Nikolaevich Tcherepnin (1899-1977) built an impressive life for himself as a composer, pianist, and teacher. His career spanned almost three quarters of a century, spread over three continents, and brought him into contact with some of the most fascinating creative personalities of the age. Yet as an emigre, Tcherepnin until recently was shunned in his native Russia, and despite spending decades of his creative life in New York and Chicago he has been, for reasons unknown, largely ignored in this country as well. When Ludmila Korabelnikova's book was published in 1999 (Aleksandr Cherepnin: dolgue stranstvie [Alexander Tcherepnin: A Long Journey. Moscow: Yazyki Russkoi Kul'tury. 1999]), it became the first, groundbreaking Tcherepnin study in Russian. Its translation by Anna Winestein, as the title under review, has the distinction of being the inaugural biography of the composer in the English Language. It is fitting, perhaps, that this study was penned by a Russian scholar, for throughout his life Alexander Tcherepnin identified with his home country, from which he was torn by wars and revolutions. The preferred language for this polyglot was evidently Russian, and his musical style, however modern and idiosyncratic, was by his own admission rooted in the tradition of the St. Petersburg compositional school, just as it was true of his models Stravinsky and Prokofiev. Prior to Korabelnikova's work,...