Pianist Stephen B. Cook performs Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-Tableaux, Op. 39 accompanied by projected images of paintings (mostly Russian) and readings of Russian poetry translated by Notre Dame Associate Professor of Russian Alyssa Gillespie. This multi-media presentation was inspired by Rachmaninoff’s own testimony that poetry and painting were intimately bound up in the composition of these experimental “study-pictures,” which together comprise the composer’s last major work before his emigration from Russia in 1917.
This concert is sponsored by the Program in Russian and East European Studies and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, with generous support from the Departments of German and Russian, Music, and Art, Art History, and Design.