My Conservatoire years were tough ones. I still remember the cold classrooms in the unheated building, the meagre rations, and the devastation in the city. Every day I had to cover the fair distance from our house on Nikolayevskaya Street (now Marat Street) to the Conservatoire and back again. If the trams were running at all, they were extremely infrequent and it was hard to get on them. But despite all the hardships, I have warm memories of this period. My fellow-students loved to play music, and we also listened to lots of good music. We were prepared to walk miles and even forgo our suppers for the sake of hearing or playing some new work. Many of my colleagues at the Conservatoire loved to play four-handed piano pieces. I played masses of classical works with Pavel Feldt (now conductor at the Kirov Theatre), for example, and with N. Malakhovsky, who was to become a composer and is now sadly no longer with us.