Lost in the Stars: Introduction

Emil Gilels introduced us. It was in 1973 when Gilels came to town, offering a recital which included Petroushka and Les Images. He was in glorious form, commanding all the dynamic expression, the sheer aliveness in rhythm and ardor for which he was so rightly celebrated. At concert's close the audience jumped to its feet, yelling applause and clapping rhythmically, thus to honor him with one of his own country's traditions.

Siloti, left, with student Rachmaninoff

"The music is out of print. He never made records. No one knows him now. This was Siloti."

So began my own search for the music, for whatever might have been the career and character of Alexander Siloti. According to the books and teachers I consulted, Siloti's name existed only in the gray past of ancient pianists. "His teacher was Liszt," I was told. "His student was Rachmaninoff. That is all."

I soon made it my business to visit every library and bookstore I could, but this proved a waste of time. Gilels was right. It was all out of print, even the encore he had played.

On the day we arrived, my piano mentor Tom Durrie and I stumbled around the Carnegie Hall district and eventually into Patelson's, a music store. Entering, I approached a very old man and began my weary question. "Hello. I heard Emil Gilels play a piece by a Russian composer named Siloti and I was wondering if you have it or anything by him anything will do thank you." He replied immediately. "What? You know who was Siloti? You know him? This is good. Yes, yes I will help you. You stay there. I will be back. We have him, I think. You stay there please."

After five or six minutes passed he returned, bearing only a small slip of white paper. "I am sorry," he said. "We no longer have it. But you call her. Tell her Josef sent you. She will help you with this music. Bring her flowers."

I looked at the paper. It bore a name, phone number, and Upper West Side address. "Kyriena Siloti?" I asked. "Is this a relative?"

"It is his daughter. She is still alive."

A booming Russian-accented voice answered the phone. "Yes, yes, he is right. I am busy with students but I can see you on Saturday at two o'clock for twenty minutes only. Do not be late. You may bring flowers. Everyone brings flowers. Don't be late. Goodbye."

I dressed up in my Horowitz suit, blew the dinner money on carnations, and arrived promptly. I left more than two hours later laden with music, stories, awe and welcome. Twenty years later, I began writing this book. Today, we have created -- with the legacy of the late Maria Siloti, the help of her family, and my own collection -- an Alexander Siloti Archive at Stanford University. A comparable collection has been established in the International Piano Archive at the University of Maryland, College Park, this courtesy of Kyriena's own gift.

And twenty-five years later, musicians and scholars have begun to rediscover the wonder of Siloti's achievement as pianist, conductor, impresario, advocate for new music, and mentor of new composers -- among them Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky. He is also being rediscovered as arranger, composer and editor, and revered teacher of two decades' tenure at Juilliard.

As conductors and pianists now bring the discipline and power of informed performance practise to the music of the late 19th century, the music of Siloti is returning to life. A set of CDs is being recorded, documenting Siloti's work in the great tradition of 19th-Century transcription, and an American publishing venture is now printing the Siloti manuscripts.

It is the purpose of this book to recreate something of the vital times in which he lived, the St Petersburg musical culture which he led from the turn of the century to the October Revolution, and his own taste and aesthetic and its part in the broader artistic life of his era.

Early in his life, he was a man of striking influence. For years he concertized across Russia, Europe, and America, and earned stunning reviews. Barely out of his teens, Siloti was chosen by Tchaikovsky as piano soloist on his first European conducting tour. Years later, he and Rachmaninoff would take turns playing and conducting the latter's piano concerti. The First had been dedicated to Siloti; the Second was premiered by him. Siloti conducted Delius in St Petersburg before Beecham did in England. In the Siloti Concerts of 1903 - 1917, he brought to his public such artists as Sibelius, Glazunov, Enesco, Josef Hofmann, Scriabin and Prokofiev. In the same series, his guest conductors included Albert Coates, Mottl, Mengelberg, Nikisch, Schoenberg, Weingartner, and Rimsky-Korsakov.

Later in his career, Siloti gave a stunning set of concerti. In one evening he performed the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No. 1, the Beethoven Emperor, and the Liszt Totentanz. Reviewing the Tchaikovsky, Olin Downes wrote that Siloti had performed, "... with extraordinary authority and power... [giving] the concerto, for once, its own grand architecture and its lordly power... The mental breadth and the physical resource of the performer matched the sonorities of the tumultuous orchestral climaxes, so that there was not the sense of a piano fighting against too heavy odds with the assembled instruments. So far as the adequacy of the solo instrument was concerned, there were two orchestras. The one with keys was in the hands of a real Russian bear, whose roar was that of a king of the forest. For this is a man-sized concerto and a man of the old school was playing." (1)

It should be noted that Downes wrote this review in 1929, a year after Horowitz had made his famous New York debut with the same concerto. Horowitz was 25, Siloti 66.

Gilels was right, of course. Although he lived well into the age of electrical recordings and the first experiments in stereo, there exists not a single recording of any Siloti concerto performance. There are no known recordings of any concert conducted by him. No film or newsreel was ever made of Siloti in rehearsal or on stage. Siloti disliked recording altogether, judging it to be a technically inadequate and artistically defective procedure. Consequently, and to paraphrase Mark Grant, his once stellar reputation has been entirely eclipsed by other virtuosi of his era who left a sonic record of their art.

In 1987, while interviewing pianist and daughter-in-law Maria Siloti I asked if, by any chance, the family had anything of Siloti in performance.

"Oh yes, but it's not very good," she said. "You wouldn't be interested. It's something his girlfriend had him do. She had this home-play disc cutter, and she talked him into it. I think you can even hear him sing." (2)

These, the only 'live' recordings known to have survived, were made at Siloti's Ansonia Hotel apartment in New York City in January, February, and March 1941. There is also a disc on which, apparently, Siloti speaks and a string quartet is heard. Regrettably, it is now unplayable. Although plagued by severe acoustical problems, these discs are the only remaining evidence of what Siloti must have sounded like. Together with eight piano rolls, it is all we know of his art. The rest has been forgotten.

At the Ansonia, in his 82nd and final year, Alexander Siloti knew only that he had simply outlived his times. At the end of his life, this great musician was often seen to set a place at table for Liszt, his teacher sixty years earlier.

Siloti would not forget.