Sonatine Sportive - Alto Sax and Piano

Alexander Tcherepnin (1899-1977) was a cosmopolitan composer and concert pianist.  Important cities in his life were St. Petersburg (to 1918), Tbilisi, then known as Tiflis (1918-1921), Paris (1921-1949), Chicago (1949-1964), and New York (from 1964).  Tcherepnin's father, Nikolai, was a composer and conductor, and Alexander landed in Paris because of his father's moves. 

Tcherepnin made extended trips to China and Japan between 1934 and 1937.  He met his wife, Lee Hsien Ming Tcherepnin (1915-1991) in China.  They were living in Paris at the time of the Nazi Occupation and he had to write music under assumed names to disguise his Russian identity.  He taught music at DePaul University in Chicago from 1949 to 1964.  He and Ming became American citizens in 1958.  In 1967, Tcherepnin was the second Russian emigre composer after Stravinsky (1962) to tour the Soviet Union as guest of the Soviet government.

Tcherepnin was considered an original modernist composer, who employed a nine-step scale of "chromatic tetrachords" and a principle of note relations that he called "Interpoint."

Sonatine Sportive dates from 1943.  The French publisher Leduc spelled the composer's last name as "Tcherepnine."