Sigma Alpha Iota

PAN PIPES • SUMMER 2016 • sai-national.org 22 Malcolm Frager, who performed it when he won both the 1959 Leventritt Competition in New York and the 1960 Queen Elisabeth of Belgium Competition in Brussels. e second movement is a technical feat: for almost three minutes, there are no rests for the soloist as both hands must very rapidly strike keys in parallel 16 th -note passages an octave apart. In 1923, Sergei married Lina Prokofiev. e couple had met in New York and then lived in Paris before settling down in Moscow in 1936. When I was in Russia's capital in 1964, I felt like a secret agent going to a clandestine meeting when I took a taxi to Mrs. Prokofiev's address, which my brother had given me, and climbing the stairs to her flat. She hadn't been expecting me and wasn't home when I knocked, so I scribbled a message about when I'd return and slid the note under the door. When I arrived the following day, she greeted me warmly. In her modest upper-level apartment, sparsely furnished, she was a most gracious hostess, absolutely thrilled with my gi, several pairs of nylon hosiery, quite a luxury for her. During our visit on July 6, she served a delicious meal and explained that the Soviet Gulag had sentenced her to twenty years of hard labor because she had tried to send money to her mother in Spain. Fortunately, shortly aer Stalin's death -- coincidentally the exact same day as Prokofiev's -- Lina was freed. In 1986 at age 89, Lina narrated Peter and the Wolf at its fiieth-anniversary celebration performance in New York. I was there and shall never forget her mellifluous voice. (Today you can download her narration of the Russian tale on Chandos 8511 from theclassicalshop. net.) Aer the concert, I went backstage for our all-too-brief, and ultimately final, reunion. By her side was her son Oleg. While I was at the museum in Moscow, I fondly recalled these personal and priceless experiences and shared them with Gera who translated them for Elizaveta. Before leaving the city, a ship tour group stopped by the Novodevichy Cemetery. While others went to see the graves of political leaders, such as Nikita Khrushchev and Boris Yeltsin, I searched for the grave of Prokofiev. Walking along, I sang some of his melodies and reflected on this wonderful trip. Jayne I. Hanlin is an initiate of Alpha Omicron and current member of the St. Louis Alumnae chapter. Mrs. Hanlin, the sister of famed pianist Malcolm Frager, is the co- author of Learning Latin Through Mythology (Cambridge University Press, 1991). A WORLD OF MUSIC At left, a sculpture of Sergei Prokofiev in the Concert Hall Exhibit at the Prokofiev Museum. At top, the Concert Hall at the museum. Above, the manual typewriter on which Sergei wrote the libretto for War and Peace. PROKOFIEV continued from page 21

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