“The idea of this album arose many years ago, at the time I released my second solo album Vergessene Weisen (forgotten melodies)- Russian music at the turn of the 20th century. What keeps amazing me is the number of gems that are still to be discovered in the piano repertoire of this period and the high quality of these rarely performed works. Of course, time eventually puts everything in its place, though sometimes this process is rather slow. A thought that has often occurred to me is that, at the time when this music was being written, these Russian composers may well have bumped into people like Vladimir Lenin or Nikola Tesla on the streets of Paris, and nobody then knew the impact such people would have on the world. That said, this album was not intended as a compilation of rare Russian piano works, but as a lively musical extract from this exciting period in which Europe underwent rapid and dramatic change…” (Anna Zassimova) Anna Zassimova studied piano under Vladimir Tropp, Michael Uhde, and Markus Strange. A versatile artist, she also has a doctorate in musicology and a degree in art history. She teaches at the University of Music in Karlsruhe and lives in Baden-Baden.