Students in Moscow

When I arrived in Moscow, in January 1962, I had just two words of Russian - 'da' and 'nyet'! In order to survive I had to learn the language as quickly as possible. The conservatoire provided 8 hours of individual tuition per week but I was also lucky to become friends with two of the very few English speaking students there.

Malcolm Brown (in the centre of the picture) was a post-graduate musicologist from Bloomington, Indiana and Manuel Suarez (on the right) was a violin student from Mexico. They helped to guide me around and translate menus!

Manuel later became the third member of my piano trio along with Stefan Popov. We studied chamber-music with Professor Adzhemov, and one of our performances was in Klin, birthplace of Tchaikovsky.