Rachmaninoff & the Tsar: A New Musical by Hershey Felder
World premiere production from actor, pianist, playwright, and producer Hershey Felder!:
Having safely left Russia during the 1917 revolution, legendary pianist and composer Sergei V. Rachmaninoff made his home in the United States. In 1942, at the age of 68, he received American citizenship and bought a home in Beverly Hills, but his native home remained in his soul. Six months thereafter, a terminal illness brought forth the memory of a long-ago encounter with Russia’s last Tsar, Nicholas II, and the Tsar’s daughter, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, a memory that would haunt him until the very last.
This exploration of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s itinerant but extraordinary life illuminates the master’s sense of home and family and how those elements influenced his art. Featuring his world-famous C# minor Prelude to his second piano concerto, his symphonies and his Paganini Variations.