A Digital Journal of the Russian Cultural Garden, Cleveland
Issue #11 · August 2026
Isaac Levitan, Birch Grove, 1885–1889.
Igor Severyanin, 1909
There is in quiet August, dreaming and mild, A grief so soft, so given over to song, That one regrets the past, gone by in a moment, And the heart asks: put in at the harbor of forgetting. They come back to me, misty and disjointed — Scraps of Augusts, their arrivals, their departures… And to my soul they are all one and the same, As a steamer that has passed is to the rocks of a lake…
Translated for the Gazette; the Russian edition prints the original.
19 August 1991 — thirty-five years ago.
Thirty-five years ago, on 19 August 1991, every channel of state television in what was still the USSR played the ballet Swan Lake, over and over, without end.
Tchaikovsky’s beautiful and eternal music was substituting itself for news of the coup then under way in the country, and for the response of millions of people to an attempt to turn back the change toward a free life. We were young, and ready to defend our right to choose our own fate.
“Blessed is the one who has visited this world in its fateful minutes,” wrote Fyodor Tyutchev nearly two hundred years ago, in a poem addressed to Cicero — who lived through the fateful minutes of the Roman Republic more than two thousand years before that.
It seemed the best illustration that no one holds a monopoly on fateful minutes. In that same Russia, where stagnation — “stability” — is usually accompanied by aggression at home and abroad, the fateful minutes coincide with rare outbursts of popular energy, senseless and merciless. And with glimpses of freedom, and with freedom, of the national Genius. Were it not for the talents, for the beautiful language of a beautiful literature, for the music, the arts, the sciences — there would be no Swan Lake either, in any sense of that phenomenon…
Summer in Russia is short and long awaited. Painters have never stopped noticing.
An instrument played by waving your hands — and a world premiere in Cleveland.
Leon Theremin (28 August 1896 – 3 November 1993) was a physicist and inventor, best known for the instrument that carries his name — among the earliest electronic instruments ever built. He patented it in the United States in 1928. To play it, a musician moves both hands beside two antennas, one governing pitch and the other volume, never touching the instrument at all.
Audiences today associate that eerie tone with science fiction. At first it belonged much more to the concert hall. The virtuoso Clara Rockmore toured with hers, playing familiar repertoire with symphony orchestras. Not content to borrow melodies written for other instruments, the composer Joseph Schillinger wrote a new orchestral suite built around the theremin: his First Airphonic Suite, op. 21. The Cleveland Orchestra and Sokoloff agreed to give it its premiere.
The premiere took place on 29 November 1929. Critic James H. Rogers braved a blizzard to attend, and wrote that one listens to the instrument spellbound and baffled — and charmed too, for its tone has warmth, beauty, power.
Nearly a century later, the theremin has still not returned to a Cleveland Orchestra subscription concert as a solo instrument.
The Rachmaninoff we rarely meet.
Nikolai Sokoloff, who conducted that premiere and served as the first conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, left unpublished memoirs. In them another Russian musician appears — in a very different light.
Historical lore paints Rachmaninoff as stern, unsmiling, and melancholy. In Sokoloff’s pages he is someone else entirely — mischievous, and quick.
In 1932, Sokoloff visited Rachmaninoff at his villa in Rambouillet, France, ahead of an upcoming tour performance in Cleveland. On arriving, he politely asked if he might wash his hands. Rachmaninoff sent him upstairs with oddly precise instructions: the door on the right, not the one on the left.
When Sokoloff pulled the flush handle, the plumbing did not roar. It tinkled out, meticulously, the melody of The Carnival of Venice.
Amused, Sokoloff whistled the tune as he came back down into the drawing room. The moment he walked in, the famously brooding Rachmaninoff burst into helpless laughter. The fixture was an elaborate joke, a gift from the piano magnate William Steinway, who sent Rachmaninoff comic gadgets on the grounds that the Russian maestro was far too serious.
The Stars of Summer.
Rachmaninoff kept a joke in his plumbing. Theremin taught an orchestra to listen to electricity. Levitan, Korovin and Petrov-Vodkin spent their summers looking hard at ordinary fields. Every one of them was young once, and someone gave them a stage.
That is what the Stars of Summer International Piano, Vocal and Dance Competition and Festival does now, in Cleveland, for musicians and dancers from around the world — some of them aged five and up. Performances from the competition are gathered on its channel: youtube.com/@thestarsofsummer384.
The 7th Annual Laureates’ Concert takes place on Sunday, 30 August 2026, at the Italian Cultural Garden, 990 East Boulevard, during One World Day. The young laureates perform with the Snowbelt Symphony Orchestra. Admission is free; tickets, where offered, are for donations rather than entry. Details at TheStarsOfSummerUSA.com.
Join the Russian Cultural Garden delegation for the Parade of Flags, then continue the celebration with music at the Stars of Summer Laureates’ Concert in the Italian Cultural Garden.
#OWD2026CLE
