"You remember the strange stories current
about him. The cunning ones said that he had a clever press agent. This was true enough.
One of the most prominent agents in London discovered him playing in a Paris cabaret. Two
months later he was playing at the Queen's Hall, and musical London lay at his feet."
"He had something of the personality of Paganini, as you
remember, except that he was a smaller man; long, gaunt, yellowish hands and the face of a
haggard Mephistopheles. The critics quarrelled about him, as critics only quarrel about
real genious, and while one school proclaimed that Tchériapin had discovered an entirely
new technique, a revolutionary system of violin playing, another school was equally
positive in declaring that he could not play at all, that he was a mountebank, a
triackster, whose proper place was in a variety theatre.""Tchériapin,"
Tales of Chinatown. pp. 264-265.
New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1922. |
| "Enthralled by the dynamism and rhythmic ferocity of Prokofiev, the
teenaged Tcherepnin turned out piano concerti, fourteen sonatas, and also dozens of
miniatures, which his father referred to as "little fleas" because of their wide
leaps. When Tcherepnin arrived in Paris in 1921, his piano teacher, Isidore Philipp,
assembled sets of these small works for publication. The first ten, Bagatelles, Opus 5,
have become a staple of the modern repertoire for students and concert pianists alike.
Tcherepnin described them as "absolutely anti-impressionistic and anti-eclectic,
rather like Prokofiev, but with chromaticism." Bagatelle #4 incorporates an aria from
one of his operas. When his father heard the earliest, the wild and mechanistic #7,
written when the composer was thirteen, he was persuaded that his son was a composer 'by
the grace of God'." Tcherepnin, Alexander. http://web.mit.edu/eniale/www/music/tche.html |