before to build on his career as a conductor. Koussevitzky asked for Stravinsky to compose a new piece for one of his upcoming concerts; Stravinsky agreed to a piano concerto, to which Koussevitzky convinced him that he be the soloist at its premiere. Stravinsky agreed, and the Concerto for Piano and Wind Instruments was first performed in May 1924. The piece was a success, and Stravinsky secured himself the rights to exclusively perform the work for the next five years. Following a European tour through the latter half of 1924, Stravinsky completed his first US tour in early 1925, which spanned two months. It opened with Stravinsky conducting an all-Stravinsky program at Carnegie Hall. He visited Catalonia six times, and the first time, in 1924, after holding three concerts with the Pau Casals Orchestra at the Gran Teatre del Liceu, he stated: "Barcelona will be unforgettable for me. What I liked most was the cathedral and the sardanas". In May 1927, Stravinsky's opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex premiered in Paris. The funding of its production was largely provided by Winnaretta Singer, Princesse Edmond de Polignac, who paid 12,000 francs for a private preview of the piece at her house. Stravinsky gave the money to Diaghilev to help finance the public performances. The premiere at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt received a negative reaction, believed by painter Boris Grigoriev to be due to its tameness compared to The Firebird, which irked Stravinsky, who had started to become annoyed at the public's fixation towards his early ballets. In the summer of 1927 Stravinsky received a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, his first from the US. A wealthy patroness of music, Coolidge requested a thirty-minute ballet score for a festival to be held at the Library of Congress, for a $1,000 fee. Stravinsky accepted and wrote Apollo, which premiered in 1928. From 1931 to 1933, the Stravinskys lived in Voreppe, a commune near Grenoble in southeastern France. In June 1934, the couple acquired French citizenship. Later in that year, they left Voreppe to live on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, where they stayed for five years. The composer used his citizenship to publish his memoirs in French, entitled Chroniques de ma Vie in 1935, and underwent a US tour with Samuel Dushkin. His only composition of that year was the Concerto for Two Solo Pianos, which was written for himself and his son Soulima using a