The World of Boris Pasternak: A Piano Recital by Hannah-Elizabeth Teoh Featuring Special Literary Guests

We concluded the academic year 2023-24 with an extraordinary event celebrating the artistic and literary legacy of the Pasternak family, marking the death anniversaries of Boris Pasternak (30 May) and Leonid Pasternak (31 May). This exceptional evening brought together music, literature, and family history to celebrate Boris Pasternak, the celebrated Russian poet and author of Doctor Zhivago. Few know that Pasternak once pursued music, inspired by his upbringing in an aristocratic household where great composers such as Scriabin and Rachmaninoff were frequent guests.

The evening featured performances of Boris Pasternak’s only surviving piano compositions, masterfully played by Hannah-Elizabeth Teoh (@hannahteohpiano), an award-winning pianist who has trained at the Royal Academy of Music, the École Normale de Musique de Paris, and the Royal College of Music.

We were thrilled to welcome our special literary guests for the evening:

• Nicolas Pasternak Slater, son of Boris’s sister Lydia, and a distinguished translator of Russian literature, including Doctor Zhivago and Boris Pasternak’s Family Correspondence, 1921–1960.
• Ann Pasternak-Slater, Nicolas’s sister, a translator and biographer, whose work includes A Vanished Present(Alexander Pasternak’s memoirs) and Indirect Dissidence: Shakespeare and Pasternak. Ann is a Senior Research Fellow at St Anne’s College, Oxford.
• Professor Philip Ross Bullock, a leading scholar of Russian literature and music at the University of Oxford. Author of works on Platonov, Tchaikovsky, and Rachmaninoff, he has contributed extensively to the study of Russian cultural history.

Together, they provided poetic interludes and engaging insights into Boris Pasternak’s life, family legacy, and creative spirit.

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