Oscar night with Dimitri Tiomkin and the London Symphony OrchestraDavid Karlin, 27th October
If you were to go to a cinema in St Petersburg of the 1910s, the pianist playing the backing music to the silent movie might have been one of two Dimitris: a very young Shostakovich, or the slightly older Dimitri Tiomkin. While Shostakovich stayed to make his fame within classical music in Soviet Russia, Tiomkin went west and fetched up in Hollywood.
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