Novelist Leo Tolstoy, poet and novelist Boris Pasternak, dance impresario Sergei Diaghilev and choreographer George Balanchine were all distinguished Russians in their own fields. Although they lived in different times, they are bound together by their deep love for music.
"Tolstoy's Waltz," a CD recently released on King Records, pays tribute to their passion for music, by featuring their compositions as well as those by authors Alexandr Griboedov (1795-1829) and Vladimir Odoevsky (1803-1869), and painters Vasily Polenov (1844-1927) and Pavel Fedotov (1815-1852).
To play the music for the CD, Yukihisa Miyayama, producer of King International Inc., chose not an elder master but Lera Auerbach, a 30-year-old Russian pianist/composer living in New York.