DESCRIPTION:
John Bell Young plays this rare work, a waltz composed by the great Russian novelist, Leo Tolstoy.

Almost nothing is known about this waltz, attributed to Leo Tolstoy, and presumably composed at Yasnaya Polyana sometime after he wrote War and Peace. There is no extant proof he really composed it, not even a manuscript in his hand. The score was tucked away neatly on a dusty shelf of the music library at the Moscow (ne Tchaikovsky) Conservatory, where the distinguished pianist Margarita Fyodorova rescued it from oblivion. In its brief 32 measures it shows us its charm, its unruffled symmetry, and the carefree nostalgia once born aloft by bourgeois elegance. Tolstoi or not, it is a souvenir of a faded era, nothing more, nothing less.