The first time I heard Rachmaninoff was back in Petersburg in 1915. He played his Second Piano Concerto. It was a matinee, and the audience was full of youngsters who, like myself, had come with their mothers. But I wasn’t looking around, Rachmaninoff made such an impression on me when he appeared onstage. He was extremely serious, even grim, as if he were not yet quite awake. He settled on the chair, looked at the audience from under his hairy brow (a characteristic mannerism, as I was to learn), as if to check that all the tickets had been sold. (At least, that was my impression then.) He seemed in no hurry to start playing, and after some thought, he apparently came to the conclusion that his chair was too far from the piano. He decided to move it closer. So he reached out and grabbed the piano, then tried to pull the chair, with him on it, toward the instrument. Instead the piano moved toward him. The audience, up till then breathless, gasped. Rachmaninoff didn’t need to play after that, he could have got a standing ovation right there. (Chaliapin in Boris Godunov’s death scene, appearing on the stage even before singing “Wait! I’m still the tsar!” had a similar effect.) << less