Premieres Friday, April 25, 2025 at 8 p.m. on KPBS TV / PBS app
Sergei Rachmaninoff was a Russian aristocrat who lost everything in the Bolshevik revolution: his home, his family fortune, even his musical inspiration. Fleeing Russia with his wife and daughters, he landed in New York and reinvented himself as modern American artist.
On this episode, host Scott Yoo explores Rachmaninoff’s American journey and the new technology that made it possible with Russian pianist Anna Polonsky and Ukrainian-American photographer Sonia Goydenko.
He listens to, and recreates, some of Rachmaninoff’s original piano rolls and recordings and visits his ‘paradise in exile,’ the villa Rachmaninoff later built on Lake Lucerne to remind him of his childhood home, with Russian pianist Yevgeny Sudbin and his daughter Bella.
Places visited: Lake Lucerne, Switzerland; New York, Brooklyn, New York; New Jersey
This episode will be available to stream with the PBS app.
About the Series: Scott Yoo, conductor and artistic director of the Mexico City Philharmonic, returns with the sixth season of the critically acclaimed series NOW HEAR THIS to examine the musical inspirations of Frédéric Chopin, Luigi Boccherini, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Agustín Barrios.
All these composers are expats or exiles, their music shaped by nostalgia for a homeland they couldn’t return to, and new friendships, ideas and opportunities in new places. Their careers were marked by loss and longing, but ultimately renewal and redemption.
Yoo visits Poland, Paraguay, Uruguay, Brazil, France, Switzerland, Mexico and more to explore the the musical evolution of these artists and play the compositions that solidified their musical legacy.
