Alexei Stanchinsky ‒ Piano Sonata No.1

Alexei Stanchinsky (1888 - 1914), Piano Sonata No.1 in F Major (1911 - 1912) Performed by Daniel Blumenthal 00:00 - No. 1 Allegro 07:30 - No. 2 Adagio 13:22 - No. 3 Presto One of the forgotten mulitiude of Russians in the years before the Great War and the Bolshevist Revolution, Stanchinsky was born in Vladimir Government. He studied piano with Josef Lhevinne and, at the Moscow Conservatoire, with the Sitoli disciple, Konstantin Igumnov. Composition lessons followed in 1904, when he was 16, with Zhilyayev and Taneyev. In 1908, on the death of his father, he fell victim to a chronic hereditary mental illness of schizophrenic nature, dementia praecox. Confined to a clinic for a year, suffering from hallucinations and religious mania interspersed by moments of lucidity, he was finally discharged, declared incurably insane. His tragic end came on October 1914. Found dead by a stream on the Crimean estate of one of his friends, how he died is not known -- though it is suspected to have b