Composing at the piano was a life-long preoccupation for Stravinsky, whose music for the instrument spanned a forty-year period, and reflected his distinct stylistic changes, his associated domestic and financial status and the geo-political situations in which he lived. Thus, prior to his trilogy of pre-war Russian ballets, his piano music up to 1908 might be regarded largely as imitative and can be viewed very much through the lens of other composers. It was as a twenty-year-old law student at St Petersburg University that Stravinsky first showed his earliest piano pieces to Rimsky-Korsakov - whose son Vladimir was there also as a law student. In the agitated rhythms of the modest ternary form Scherzo in G minor of 1902 Stravinsky shows considerable promise and, in its harmonic vocabulary, a debt to Tchaikovsky.