A Digital Journal of the Russian Cultural Garden, Cleveland
Some summers refuse to end
Ray Bradbury, Farewell Summer
Issue #11 · August 2026
Every Garden has flowers.Every Cultural Garden has stories.
Isaac Levitan, Birch Grove, 1885–1889.
A Musical Practical Joke
The Rachmaninoff we rarely meet.
Historical lore paints Rachmaninoff as stern, unsmiling, and melancholy. The unpublished memoirs of Nikolai Sokoloff, first conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra, reveal a composer with a deeply hidden streak of mischief.
In 1932, Sokoloff visited Rachmaninoff at his villa in Rambouillet, France, ahead of an upcoming tour performance in Cleveland. On arriving, he politely asked if he might wash his hands. Rachmaninoff sent him upstairs with oddly precise instructions: the door on the right, not the one on the left.
When Sokoloff pulled the flush handle, the plumbing did not roar. It tinkled out, meticulously, the melody of The Carnival of Venice.
Amused, Sokoloff whistled the tune as he came back down into the drawing room. The moment he walked in, the famously brooding Rachmaninoff burst into helpless laughter. The fixture was an elaborate joke, a gift from the piano magnate William Steinway, who sent Rachmaninoff comic gadgets on the grounds that the Russian maestro was far too serious.
The Carnival of Venice — the tune the plumbing played.
August Birthday: Leon Theremin
An instrument played by waving your hands — and a world premiere in Cleveland.
Leon Theremin (28 August 1896 – 3 November 1993) was a physicist and inventor, best known for the instrument that carries his name — among the earliest electronic instruments ever built. He patented it in the United States in 1928. To play it, a musician moves both hands beside two antennas, one governing pitch and the other volume, never touching the instrument at all.
Audiences today associate that eerie tone with science fiction. At first it belonged much more to the concert hall. The virtuoso Clara Rockmore toured with hers, playing familiar repertoire with symphony orchestras. Not content to borrow melodies written for other instruments, the composer Joseph Schillinger wrote a new orchestral suite built around the theremin: his First Airphonic Suite, op. 21. The Cleveland Orchestra and Sokoloff agreed to give it its premiere.
Leon Theremin at his instrument, Joseph Schillinger at the piano, and Nikolai Sokoloff standing by. Private rehearsal, November 1929.The Cleveland News, 21 November 1929: “Theremin to Be Played Here.”
Not everyone was charmed
Of that first rehearsal, with Theremin himself playing, Sokoloff wrote that he did not know quite what happened — but the thing suddenly emitted the most unearthly, ear-splitting shriek, and to his horror he watched the orchestra’s wonderful first horn, Isadore Berv, keel over in a dead faint.
The premiere took place on 29 November 1929. Critic James H. Rogers braved a blizzard to attend, and wrote that one listens to the instrument spellbound and baffled — and charmed too, for its tone has warmth, beauty, power.
Nearly a century later, the theremin has still not returned to a Cleveland Orchestra subscription concert as a solo instrument.
Russian Summer in Painting
Summer in Russia is short and long awaited. Painters have never stopped noticing.
Isaac Levitan · A meadow at the edge of a rye fieldNo incident, no figure, no story. A wall of ripening grain, a slope of wildflowers, one birch holding the middle of the canvas. Levitan trusted the ordinary landscape to carry everything, and it does.Konstantin Korovin · At the Tea Table, 1888The samovar is the brightest thing on the table and nobody is looking at it. Light comes through the veranda from a garden going gold at the edges. An afternoon that nobody present thought worth remembering, which is exactly why it survives.Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin · Midday. Summer, 1917A whole life seen at once from above: haymaking, a cart, cattle, lovers in the grass, a child, a coffin carried along a path — and enormous apples hanging in the foreground. Painted in 1917, it holds birth and death in one green field and refuses to rank them.
From Cultural Tradition to a New Generation
The Stars of Summer.
Rachmaninoff kept a joke in his plumbing. Theremin taught an orchestra to listen to electricity. Levitan, Korovin and Petrov-Vodkin spent their summers looking hard at ordinary fields. Every one of them was young once, and someone gave them a stage.
That is what the Stars of Summer International Piano, Vocal and Dance Competition and Festival does now, in Cleveland, for musicians and dancers from around the world — some of them aged five and up. Performances from the competition are gathered on its channel: youtube.com/@thestarsofsummer384.
The 7th Annual Laureates’ Concert takes place on Sunday, 30 August 2026, at the Italian Cultural Garden, 990 East Boulevard, during One World Day. The young laureates perform with the Snowbelt Symphony Orchestra. Admission is free; tickets, where offered, are for donations rather than entry. Details at TheStarsOfSummerUSA.com.
One World Day is almost here
Join the Russian Cultural Garden delegation for the Parade of Flags, then continue the celebration with music at the Stars of Summer Laureates’ Concert in the Italian Cultural Garden.
Every Garden has flowers.Every Cultural Garden has stories.
