"Rachmaninoff on a Wednesday Night" or "A Self-Absorbed Remembrance on Rachmaninoff"

This post could be extremely long, but I'll give you the short version. Part of the reason I want to be a university professor is so that when I'm older and I don't have to worry about tenure, I can, again, take trumpet lessons and continue to learn other languages (read, Russian). I love Russian classical music. I used to want to travel to Russia to hear the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra (still do). When I was an aspiring musician I used to spend long hours by myself listening to the Russians (didn't have many friends, still don't). In the music library at the community college I would try to listen to albums while looking at a score of the piece I was listening to so that I could see how they made a certain sound, or how a particularly moving chord progression was put together. Of all the Russian composers, Shostakovich is my favorite and Rachmaninoff is a very close second. Rachmaninoff wrote a well known piece called Vocalise (Op. 34, No. 14); if memory serves right, it was written as a vocal exercise with piano accompaniment. When I was in junior college my trumpet teacher gave me the sheet music for Rachmaninoff's exercise arranged for Trumpet and piano. I loved playing that piece but I was always challenged by my (lack of) range, I didn't know how to support the higher register and push the air through so the long build up to the notes above the staff was difficult. I was also 6' tall and weighed in at 135 lbs, so I may not have had enough muscle to push as much air through as I needed (though that is just an apologists rereading of history). Regardless, I loved playing Vocalise. Now that Shaunie has a nice digital Claviona and I have a decent trumpet (and I think I've learned how to move the air better) eventually we will get around to playing Rachmaninoff together. I assure you that it won't sound as good as this performance by Vadim Novikov (who better than a Russian trumpet player with a rich, dark tone to play Rachmaninoff?), but we will be making music none the less.