Between the two capitals

Anton Rubinstein opened the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1862, the first institution in Russia to train musicians professionally; Tchaikovsky enrolled in its first intake and graduated in 1865. Against it stood the circle around Balakirev, which argued for a national manner learned outside the academy: Cui, a military engineer by profession, wrote fastidious salon pieces, while Mussorgsky built piano textures from speech rhythm, modal inflection and blunt parallel writing. Lyapunov, close to Balakirev, pursued a demanding transcendental keyboard style. Glazunov, trained privately by Rimsky-Korsakov, joined the faculty in 1899 and directed the school from 1905.

Nikolai Rubinstein founded the Moscow Conservatory in 1866 and brought Tchaikovsky from Petersburg to teach harmony, which he did until 1878; from the mid-1880s he worked in the Klin district north-west of the city, settling in 1892 in the house that is now his museum. A generation later Zverev prepared the pianists who filled its classes: Rachmaninoff, who boarded with Zverev and then studied under Siloti, writes wide-spanned, chordal, orchestral textures; Scriabin, a day pupil of Zverev and then of Safonov, worked inward from Chopin towards a compressed, intensely chromatic idiom. Medtner left Safonov's class in 1900.

Rachmaninoff left Petrograd in December 1917, crossed to Scandinavia and reached New York in 1918; he never returned. Concert tours displaced composition, and the emigration works are few, written in concentrated spells between seasons. Medtner left in 1921, living in Berlin, then France, then London from 1935 until his death in 1951, continuing the sonatas and skazki he had begun in Moscow. Scriabin saw none of this: his late harmony, which replaced key signatures with fixed chordal sonorities, ended with his death in Moscow in April 1915.