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Much originality
John Field's Piano Concertos -
explored by ROBERT ANDERSON'... accomplished performances ...'
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Field's fame was based mainly on his career in Russia. He arrived there
with Clementi in 1802, the year after Tsar Paul had been murdered in St
Petersburg, thus inspiring Mme de Staël to characterise the government
of Russia as a 'despotism mitigated by strangulation'. Field reached the
Russia of Alexander I at a time when the youthful Tsar seemed to be nourishing
ideas of liberal reform. That they were never put into practice was due
partly to the Tsar's complex character, but also to the activities of Napoleon,
which diverted Alexander's interests to a wider European sphere. In 1819
Field met Pushkin, busy with the writing of Ruslan and Ludmilla amid
the social delights of the capital. Pushkin's Ode to Liberty secured
his banishment to the Caucasus, whereas Field was successful enough as performer
and teacher to keep royalty at a safe distance and refuse appointment as
court pianist. The friendship with Pushkin lasted, and there exists a double
portrait of poet and composer from the late 1820s. By then Pushkin had only
narrowly escaped implication in the uprising of the Decembrists at the end
of 1825 and in the first weeks of Nicholas I's reign. Field and Pushkin
died in the same year, the one from the excesses of a Byronic lifestyle,
the other from a fatal wound in a duel.
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Copyright © 21 August 2002
Robert Anderson, London, UK
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