Yeah Randy, he would never return to Russia. One rather touching commentary on this was the note that Stokowski himself wrote for the recording he did with Anna Moffo(one of my recent suggestions in the "Stunning Recordings" thread, available from Arkiv), referring to the concluding remarkably beautiful "Vocalise": "Rachmaninoff's Vocalise is like a self-portrait in tone of the composer-his intense love of Russia as he knew it as a child...his melancholy realization that it is a dreamworld he could never again experience...his emotional inner life of nostalgia".
