Finally catching-up with This Week's Composer (Rachmaninov) over an early breakfast this morning, I heard an electrifying extract from Rachmaninov's ALEKO...  an opera I freely admit to not knowing in any detail.  (Aleko's main aria turns up endlessly at opera auditions, but it was the only thing I really knew). 

Is anyone else an enthusiast for this extraordinarily powerful work?  The speed at which it which it was composed (in three weeks, including making a fair copy of the score and copying the parts) for reasons beyond the composer's control) is another astonishing aspect to the piece...  he can barely have stopped to think at all?

This is one of the great what-ifs for the whole of Russian culture of that period, not only Rachmaninov!  Medtner, for example, fled abroad too.  Stravinsky and Prokofiev should be mentioned too.   I think that when a culture is divorced from its roots, something changes and something is lost... although something is gained too.  Whether there's a "winner" in this game of win and loss is hard to say.  Non-USSR Russia might have formed some kind of counterweight to the disintegration of tonality that happened in Central Europe?  Of course this happened to a certain extent anyhow with the USSR, Shostakovich etc  (serial music being effectively banned in the USSR) but Russian music was wretchedly undermined by its soviet masters.  I somehow doubt Rachmaninov would, or could, have continued writing "romantic" music, or even that he would have wanted to?

I often think that Stravinsky's personality would have caused him to work outside Russia anyhow, and that his life was just as much a predisposition to working in the USA and Southern Europe anyhow as it was an unwillingness/inability to "go back".