Music: potentiating human creativity; healing physical, spiritual, social, and psychological wounds. This page will post information relating to the Drozdoff Society’s core mission. As works are published and recorded, and as performance are scheduled, we will keep you apprised on this page.
Mission: Our core mission is the preservation, promulgation, publication, performance, and recording of the solo piano and voice compositions of Vladimir Drozdoff, 1882-1960. It is also our intent to support the musicians who strive to bring these and the works of other pianist-composers of Drozdoff’s era to the great concert stages of the world; and to document, celebrate, and instill in a new generation of musicians the cultural and spiritual components embodied in the works of these great composers.
We want to bring world-class classical music performances and music appreciation to people who, for socio-economic reasons, have little or no access to them today.
We want to bring Drozdoff's music to those ears, yes, but we also see his life and oeuvre as a universal metaphor for the experiences of surviving conflict, oppression, immigration, and resettlement; his music clearly speaks about all those things.
We are convinced of music's capacity to potentiate human creativity in all spheres, from the humanities to the sciences, and its ability to heal physical, spiritual, social, and psychological wounds, and do not accept that those who need it the most have the least access to it.
We want to support artists like Drozdoff, who, through no fault of their own, may not have the name recognition or financial support their art deserves because of conflict, oppression, politics, or economic depression.
We want to pay our performing artists their worth.
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The Society will seek grants, donations, and membership fees to fund these activities:
• Publish in a highly polished presentation one or more anthologies of the piano and vocal compositions of Russian-American pianist-composer Vladimir N. Drozdoff;
• Launch a high-end website for the Society for the purpose of introducing the Drozdoff story, compositions, and activities of the Drozdoff Society to the world. In addition to being an ongoing source for current information, website would have materials available researchers and performers for free download.
• Further promulgate the Drozdoff compositions through performances and recordings;
• Research and document the history of Drozdoff through a documentary film and pedagogy;
• Identify a domestic or foreign library interested in preserving the physical manuscripts
Background
Russian-American Composer and Pianist Vladimir Drozdoff, born in 1882 in Saratov, Russia on the Volga River, was accepted by the St. Petersburg Conservatory as an exceptionally gifted student. A student in the piano performance class of the legendary pianist Anna Essipova, and the composition class of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, he graduated in 1905 with the coveted Rubinstein Gold Medal, and, declining an offer of employment from the Moscow Philharmonic, continued his studies with Theodore Leschetizky in Vienna.
In 1907, the Conservatory's rector, Alexander Glazounov, recalled Drozdoff to that institution to begin taking over Essipova's classes when her health declined. Among the most successful of his students were Emanuel Bay, Pauline Heifitz, and Marina Yudina. Drozdoff continued to teach there as Professor until the October 1917 Revolution. With the commencement of Civil War and the end of Russia as he knew it, Drozdoff fled with his wife Anna and two children, 9 year-old Pavel and 3 year-old Natalia, to the Crimea, whence he continued to teach and perform for three more years as the war raged. In a 1944 interview in Dance Magazine, he spoke of receiving wine in payment for performances, the use of a milk-cow in payment for lessons, and of walking more than 20 miles some days with his wife and two little children since there were no other means of communication in this period other than to appear in person.
In 1920, the family fled to Constantinople, where both Anna and Vladimir continued to live and work for the next three years. From documents in Drozdoff's archives, we know that he traveled to Paris and Vienna during this period, teaching and performing. In September 1923, the family boarded the S.S. Constantinople and sailed for New York.
Within two years, Drozdoff had his U.S. premiere with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and he and wife Anna established the Drozdoff Piano Studio in New York's upper West Side. By now, Pavel (now Paul) was also old enough to teach, and by 1928, 14 year-old daughter Natalia (now Nathalie) had earned enough money from teaching piano to buy her own first Chickering studio upright. Within a few years, both children began appearing with their father at concert venues throughout New York City -- Town Hall, Aeolian Hall, The Brooklyn Museum, Steinway Hall, and Carnegie, and Vladimir made numerous live radio broadcasts of his concerts, including an all-Drozdoff program.
Drozdoff's pre-1917 compositional legacy has been lost, some known to have been destroyed by the Bolsheviks. In her biography of Jascha Heifitz (Jascha Heifitz: Early Years in Russia), Galina Kopytova said in the chapter about Leopold Auer, "the files of professors still in Russia after the 1917 revolutions were kept, but those belonging to Auer and others who departed, such as Nikolai Malko and Vladimir Drozdov, were discarded.” Drozdoff resumed composing in 1925 and was prolific until very close to his death in 1960, writing exclusively for piano or piano with voice. Many of those compositions were published, and another 150 manuscripts are being digitized for publication now.
Sergei Rachmaninoff said of Vladimir Drozdoff, "the melodies in your compositions are so beautiful one wants to sing them.” Today, Drozdoff is enjoying a revival of interest by pianists and pedagogues in over 40 countries. Dr. George Borisov says, “Vladimir Drozdoff represents the last of his generation's best musicians: Scriabin, Medtner, Rachmaninoff, Gretchaninoff -- who emigrated from Russia, and melted into the Western cultural hemisphere."
