When he returned to St Petersburg he took piano lessons from a teacher at the St. Petersburg Conservatory called Anna Esipova. She worked hard to discipline him in his playing although he did not appreciate her efforts. He also took conducting lessons from Nikolai Tcherepnin who taught him to like late-Romantic composers such as Scriabin and Debussy. He wrote some music himself in this style, but most of the music he wrote at this time sounded very harsh and dissonant and, although he was becoming quite famous, many people hated it. When he finished his studies at the Conservatoire he won its top prize (the Rubinstein Prize) with his "First Piano Concerto", although the examiners had found it hard to agree and Rimsky-Korsakov said that Prokofiev was "gifted but immature".