Nikolai tcherepnin biography of george

After 1933, coincident with concert tours to the Middle East and the Orient, Tcherepnin began to look for a way to escape what he called "my own self-imposed technical formulas," and he soon found it in folklore.

He reinvestigated Russian, Georgian, Armenian, Azerbaijan and Persian music, later becoming especially intrigued by Chinese and Japanese folk melodies. Results were immediate: the 1933 Russian Dances for orchestra, a lightweight though effective melange (which, in a graph-like appraisal of his output he himself made in the late 1950s, found only recently in his papers, he classed rather harshly as one of his low points); the Five "Chinese" Concert Etudes for piano of 1934-36, brilliant yet delicate and lyrical; the Suite géorgienne for piano and string orchestra of 1938, subtle, refined, emotionally restrained.

Throughout his visits to the Far East between 1934 and 1937,