cantata, the Piano Sonata was played by its dedicatee Nikolay Richter in February 1905; and Stravinsky himself from time to time performed short piano pieces and comic songs, none of which has survived. There was also much musical discussion, of works heard at the soirees or at concerts or the opera. But the atmosphere, though in a sense open and stimulating, was aesthetically cramped. New music was discussed, but habitually questioned, and there was a self-congratulatory air to the conversation, dominated by Rimsky-Korsakov's own dry, cynical conservatism, as relentlessly recorded by the diarist of these gatherings, Vasiliy Yastrebtsev. They all also from time to time attended the sole alternative musical venture of these years in St Petersburg, the Evenings of Contemporary Music, an irregular and somewhat ramshackle series of chamber concerts which had started in 1902 and prided itself on breaking the conventional mould of classical concerts in the city. The Evenings were certainly the nearest approach at that time to the modern contemporary music concert, though their programmes were more heterogeneous than strictly ground-breaking, with a scattering of newish French and German works alongside the inevitable rag-bag of Russian pieces old and new. Nevertheless Stravinsky remembered them as the most intellectually stimulating musical events of the time (though he misremembered what pieces of his own they included: only his Pastorale and the first of the Gorodetsky songs, Vesna (Spring), were done before he left St Petersburg in 1910). Here he will have met for the first time the raffish set, which included the founders of the concerts, Alfred Nurok, Walter Nouvel (amateur composers, associates of Sergey Diaghilev on the art magazine Mir iskusstva, and aesthetes with a reliable passion for the new and strange), and the critic Vyacheslav Karatigin. Rimsky-Korsakov hated the evenings, partly because they escaped his influence, partly because they stood for everything he disliked: amateurishness, pluralism, contempt (however stumbling) for the rules. As for Stravinsky, nothing illustrates his own lack of rebelliousness at this time than the fact that, in his mid-20s, he scarcely figured in a local contemporary music series that would have embraced even an incompetent proto-modernist with open arms. Russia in 1905 had experienced the first serious tremors of the earthquake which, 12 years later, would destroy the country of Stravinsky's youth. The previous year, the Tsar had embarked on a damaging war with Japan, and 1905 opened with a series of lightning industrial strikes in St Petersburg which culminated in Bloody Sunday (9/22 January), when a peaceful deputation of workers and a crowd of bystanders were fired on in the Palace Square and more than 100 were killed. Like most members of his class, Stravinsky would have been broadly on the workers' side. But there is no sign that he was in any way involved, unlike the firmly liberal Rimsky-Korsakov, who was summarily dismissed from his post after publishing open letters in support of the striking students and advocating the liberalization of the Conservatory establishment. For Stravinsky, the most damaging consequence of these events may have been that the closure of the university in