Rachmaninoff's Summer of Love

Asmik Grigorian (Image: Alpha Classics) "Does [Sergei Vasiliyevich] really think we don't know he's writing a piano concerto?" Fifteen-year-old Vera Skalon wrote that question in her diary in the summer of 1890. She and her two sisters were staying at Ivanovka, the Satin family estate, some three hundred miles south of Moscow, with the two Satina sisters, and their cousin, a seventeen-year-old…