Search results for ""Author Anthony Phillips""

The second volume of Sergey Prokofiev's recently uncovered Diaries covers the years 1915 to 1922. It describes in detail the genesis and the problematic path to performance of major works in his canon, and the life-changing experiences of living in war-torn and revolutionary Russia, and deciding to leave for the mythic America he had long dreamed of visiting. The Diaries chart the author's swings of fortune, the loneliness of the émigré, his encounters with a luminous range of personalities from music, theatre, art and literature, and the search for love and friendship, all cast in the burnished prose of a born master, not just of music, but of words.

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Roman thought he'd found the perfect opportunity to rebel. He may have been wrong.He awakens strapped to a set of parallel bars in a richly appointed sitting room, and begins a conversation with a masked man which will change his life. His world has been a facade - one which the mysterious Brahma is about to tear away.A stunning novel about the real world, and about the hidden chanels of power behind the scenes, EMPIRE V is a post-modern satirical novel exploring the cults and corruption of politics, banking and power. And not only are these cults difficult to join - it turns out they may be impossible to leave . . .

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Prokofiev, a compulsive diarist, gifted and idiosyncratic writer, possessed an incorrigibly sardonic curiosity about individuals and events. When he left Russia following the 1917 Revolution, his diaries were recovered from the family flat in Petrograd, and Prokofiev smuggled them out of the country after his first return to the Soviet Union in 1927. The later diaries, written in the West, were brought back by legal decree after the composer's death, to be kept in a special, closed section of the Russian State Archive. Eventually Prokofiev's son Svyatoslav was allowed to copy the voluminous contents; when he and his son Serge Jr moved to Paris they undertook the gigantic task of reproducing the partially encoded manuscript in an intelligible form.Volume I covers the bulk of Prokofiev's years at the St Petersburg Conservatoire, ending with his triumphant graduation. Simultaneously attached to and exasperated by the traditions exemplified at this time by such famous men as Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Lyadov and Tcherepnin, the relentlessly brash young genius relishes the power of his talent to irritate, challenge and finally overcome the establishment, alongside unusually candid revelations of the all-too-normal preoccupations of a young man flexing his muscles in society.Taken as a whole, the diaries represent an inexhaustibly rich portrait of one of the most vibrant periods in the whole of Western art, peopled by virtually every musician and artist of note. They constitute both an indispensable and an entertaining source of reference for all scholars and lovers of Prokofiev's music.

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From the teenager in provincial Russia in 1875 to his premature death in Germany in 1904, Chekhov wrote over 4,500 letters to a range of correspondents, including family and friends, his publisher and fellow writers - not to mention actresses. These letters tell the story of Chekhov's life as a man and a writer and he emerges from them as a tough, generous, life-enhancing, and enigmatic character.

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