Sergey Aksakov - Bagatelle

Aksakov was a belarusian composer (1891-1968). Aksakov was born in Samara, on the Volga, and led a life of incredible variety. He studied music in Moscow, at the Conservatory, and independently (Lyapunov was one of his teachers). After starting a parallel career as a civil servant, and as a concert pianist an composer, Aksakov joined a Red Cross unit during the First World War, and then - from 1920 - went to Harbin in northern China, where there was a large Russian population to work as an administrator on the Soviet-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway. In the late 1920s, Aksakov moved to Shanghai, where he had his own studio and taught at the conservatory. Having been effectively an exile for most of the Stalinist period, he returned to Russia in 1946, to the Omsk region, where he taught piano. A few years later he made his final move, to Minsk in Belarus at the behest of the Soviet authorities. The set of four piano pieces from which this romance comes was published in Minsk in 1959. A shoutout for p