Upon the death of Mlle. Boulanger, Naoumoff took over her classes at the summer sessions of the Conservatoire d'Art Americain in Fontainebleau. In 1981, at age 19, he was signed as a composer -- the youngest on their roster -- with the music publisher Schott, Mainz. Naoumoff's reputation as a piano virtuoso dates from 1984 when he substituted without notice for a stricken pianist in a performance of Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 in Monte Carlo. That concert earned him the comparisons to Horowitz and Rubinstein, displaying -- as one critic remarked -- the fire of the former and the poetry of the latter. In the years since, he is regularly invited by the world's premier orchestras: the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, the Berlin Symphony, the Vienna Symphony, the San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony in Washington, Moscow Symphony, etc…And has collaborated closely with renowned conductors such as Leonard Bernstein, Igor Markevitch, Leonard Slatkin, Mstislav Rostropovich and Eliahu Inbal and others.
The Seasons, Op.37a (pubished with the French title Les Saisons) is a set of twelve short character pieces for solo piano by the Russian composer Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsk. Each piece is the characteristic of a different month of the year in the northern hemisphere. The work is also sometimes heard in orchestral and other arrangements by other hands. Individual excerpts have always been popular - Barcarolle (June) was enormously popular and appeared in numerous arrangements.
Romeo and Juliet is an orchestral work styled an Overture-Fantasy, and is based on Shakespeare’s play of the same name. Tchaikovsky was deeply inspired by Shakespeare and wrote works based on The Tempest and Hamlet as well. Although styled an 'Overture-Fantasy' by the composer, the overall design is a symphonic poem in sonata form with an introduction and an epilogue. The work is based on three main strands of the Shakespeare story.
Adagio Lamentoso is the fourth movement of the Symphony No. 6, Pathétique. Tchaikovski dedicated it to Vladimir "Bob" Davydov, composer's nephew with whom he was in love. The Pathétique has been the subject of a number of theories as to a hidden program. This goes back to the first performance of the work, when fellow composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov asked Tchaikovsky whether there was a program to the new symphony, and Tchaikovsky asserted that there was, but would not divulge it.
