As every musician knows, a concert date once confirmed focuses the mind wonderfully. Thus, one can appreciate that from the moment in September 1923 when Stravinsky accepted Koussevitzky’s invitation – that he should himself give the premiere of his extremely taxing Piano Concerto in Paris the following May – the clock would have started to tick its inexorable countdown. Stravinsky’s daily routine of composition would now have to incorporate hours of piano practice in the urgent recovery of the piano technique he had first acquired two decades earlier in St Petersburg, as a pupil of Leokadiya Alexandrovna Kashperova (1872–1940).1