Thursday 30 August 2018

And the answer is...



as three of you correctly guessed. The Hanover Street label* with the name is being displayed by my guide around the Villa Senar, Ettore F Volontieri, General Manager of the Serge Rachmaninoff Foundation, who came down from Zurich especially (by the way, they prefer the French spelling of the name, as do Boosey's for 'Serge Prokofieff'). I did already mention my dreamlike visit to the villa (Senar = SErgey and NAtaliya Rachmaninov) on the shores of Lake Lucerne a shortish walk from Weggis. No time at the moment to write more about the realisation of his Bauhaus-inspired dream in the early 1930s, but here he is at the time of construction sporting what they say is this very suit.


A guess at Bernstein wasn't so far fetched. 'I can't see Lenny in tweeds,' wrote one of my students in an email. Well, not in the 1950s and 60s perhaps. But to embrace his Harvard persona for those sensational Norton lectures he seems to have thought this just the thing.


*Davies & Son is/are still going, proud to have 'the longest history of any Tailor on Savile Row' going back to 1805.

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