The Russians are Coming - November Night This Coming Monday, the 7th

We are sold out!

Dear friends,

The Russians are coming to Classical Underground, by way of the San Francisco Symphony, the LA Philharmonic, CSU Northridge, and yes, even all the way from Russia!  It's an all Russian musician program, featuring some of our oldest and dearest CU friends and some welcome newcomers, and one of the greatest Russian realist painters in our Artist Showcase.

Serge Oskotsky, our own wonderful cellist with the LA Phil, and David Chernyavsky, erstwhile CU and LA Phil violinist now with the SF Symphony, will be joined for the first time by esteemed CSU Northridge piano professor Dmitry Rachmanov to perform Rachmaninoff's Trio Elegiaque #1.  Dmitry Rachmanov will also perform solo with a selection of Schubert's Moment Musicaux and song transcriptions by Liszt.

Returning to CU from Moscow is the always exciting cellist Boris Andrianov, who will perform with the Russian pianist and composer Aleksander Pokidchenko.  Take a look at this thrilling performance by Boris from a previous visit to CU: http://youtu.be/Hc3r2rKNRwg.  Making his first appearance here, Aleksander will also play Scriabin on the glorious Steinway Hamburg CD-386 from Steinway...

May we suggest bringing vodka and blini, pirogi, piroshki, pelmini, caviar to share in Russian style?  It's going to be a spirited night of great music and art!   

Boris Andrianov

                                     Serge Oskotsky                    David Chernyavsky 

Dmitry Rachmanov          Aleksander Pokidchenko

  

And the Russians will be joined by a Chinese - CU regular - Mary Au!

As always - bring your spirits, food and drink for you and your friends to enjoy.  We are sold out!

  

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We are most grateful to our supportive friends at

Steinway Piano Gallery West Hollywood 

for graciously providing us with their incomparable instrument. 

        

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Classical Underground Celebrates:

LEONID STEELE

the Living Legacy of the art of the Soviet Union

It is a great honor and pleasure to salute a great Russian Master - my father Leonid Steele -- and to wish him a very HAPPY 90TH BIRTHDAY!

Leonid Steele "Ivan Susanin" 48" X 72" oil on canvas 1952

Leonid Steele is an important Russian Artist of the Socialist Realism School, known as "Socrealizm". A graduate of the much venerated Leningrad Repin Art Institute, former Russian Imperial Academy of Arts, and an heir to the Russian Academic Tradition, he became one of the masters of what is now known in the West as Soviet Impressionism of the 1950s - early 1960s, and one of the pioneers and leading masters of the Severe Style of the 1960s.

He is part of a remarkable group of the best artists of his era, who under the pressures of totalitarian society were able to expand its restraints and to appeal directly to the core of human emotions, contributing to the universal images of humanity.

Alexey Steele "My Father Leonid Steele" 48" X 60" oil on canvas

His ART is filled with deep empathy toward the common man, conveys a uniquely personal sense of the historic Soviet Era, and yet stands alone in its unequivocal and uncompromising search for artistic truth. He is the only artist of his historic stature with a career spanning the entire time frame of this important school of  post WWII art, who now resides in the United States.

His substantial oeuvre and life story, with its aesthetic and cultural importance as a vibrant thread that contributed to contemporary multi-cultural pattern, already belongs to history.

Drawing and painting since age four every day to this very moment - tenaciously, joyfully and vibrantly -- his remarkable life in ART stands as testimony to the powers of brilliant and restless, ever-young Creative Spirit.

Alexey 

    

In ART we trust!