LAgriculture, sacred landscape, mobility, emigration, above all music – through the person and work of Sergej Rachmaninoff one can tell so much that touches and affects us all today, says Andrea Loetscher, the newly appointed director of the cultural center “Villa Senar”. , while we chat in the café of the Lucerne Art Museum. At the end of May it was announced that the flautist, teacher and cultural manager would take care of the content of the meeting place in the Hertenstein estate of the Russian composer, pianist and conductor on Lake Lucerne.
Rachmaninoff, who ran a model farm in the Tambov governorate before the October Revolution, was one of the first to work with tractors. He later financed the development of the helicopter by Igor Sikorski in the United States. He loved the most modern cars of his time and took the motorboat from his villa to Lucerne in fifteen minutes. But he also supported the writer Ivan Bunin financially in the early days of his emigration and had himself been in exile since the age of 45 as an opponent of the terror regime of the Bolsheviks. So Rachmaninoff is also the crystallization point of stories about flight and totalitarianism; it must therefore, according to Loetscher, be of “universal cultural interest”.
