As a boy, Nathan Perelman played the piano, accompanied performers, and conducted a small ensemble aboard an agitational train associated with the First Cavalry Army. Revolution and civil war were redrawing borders, breaking institutions, and swallowing ordinary lives around him. The train carried the young Nathan Perelman (Натан Перельман) through the violence, with music on board.
Decades later, after wars, purges, political thaws, and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he remained at the piano. By then, he was one of the longest-serving teachers at the Leningrad–St. Petersburg Conservatory. He performed for nearly 70 years and taught for more than six decades. His greatest achievement lay beyond any signature interpretation or legion of pupils trained to reproduce his sound. It was a question.
Do you know precisely what you mean?
That question informed nearly everything Nathan Perelman taught. A phrase might be polished yet empty. A pause could sound dramatic and still be foolish. A pianist might produce a magnificent sound while misunderstanding the music entirely. For Nathan Perelman, artistry began when beauty stopped serving as an excuse and became a form of thought.
His influence traveled through a wide network: from three major teachers into his classroom, then onward into performance, scholarship, criticism, composition, and the lives of later students. The tradition was never a fixed set of instructions passed down unchanged. Music moved from person to person, questioned and altered, becoming alive again each time.
A Childhood in Motion
Nathan Perelman was born in Zhytomyr on August 1, 1906, or July 19 according to the calendar then used in the Russian Empire. History entered the streets, homes, railway stations, and concert halls of his childhood.
His early experience aboard an agitational train sounds almost cinematic: a child pianist traveling through civil war, providing accompaniments and helping to lead a small ensemble. The image also reveals something central to the musician he became. For Nathan Perelman, music created order under pressure, a fragile but stubborn zone of attention amid chaos.
His pupil Leonid Gakkel (Леонид Гаккель) later recalled a personality marked by lightness, humor, and faint melancholy, calling its character “Mozartian.” The description points to survival rather than innocence. Nathan Perelman lived through some of the twentieth century’s darkest decades without allowing solemnity to harden into pomposity. Wit became a form of resistance.
In the early 1920s, he studied in Kyiv with Heinrich Neuhaus (Генрих Нейгауз) and encountered the teaching of Felix Blumenfeld (Феликс Блуменфельд). He later moved to Petrograd–Leningrad, entered the class of Leonid Nikolayev (Леонид Николаев), and graduated from the conservatory in 1930.
While still a student, he accompanied silent films in Leningrad cinemas. Every night, the pianist had to respond at once to whatever appeared onscreen: a chase, a confession, a comic fall, a farewell. The work called for improvisation, characterization, timing, and emotional intelligence. Private expression was not enough; he had to follow a living drama. The ability to make music act and speak remained central to his teaching.
Three Teachers, Three Ways of Hearing
Nathan Perelman stood at the meeting point of three powerful branches of the Russian piano tradition. From each, he inherited a different answer to the question of what a pianist should hear, and he reshaped all three.
Felix Blumenfeld: The Piano as an Orchestra
Felix Blumenfeld came from a cosmopolitan musical world in which the work of pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher overlapped. His teaching stressed an inner conception of sound: performers had to imagine the musical result before their hands could produce it. From this perspective, the piano became more than a row of keys activating hammers and strings. It could be a singer, a chamber ensemble, an orchestra, or an entire dramatic stage. Technical freedom let the player pursue color, melodic line, and character rather than merely execute notes.
The young Nathan Perelman may have spent relatively little time with Felix Blumenfeld, but the imprint is visible. In later lessons, he asked students to hear beyond the instrument’s mechanics, imagining pizzicato strings, brass, drums, song, orchestral mass, and sharply contrasted instrumental voices.
This imagination served a practical end. It had to become physically audible. The student first heard an impossible sound inwardly, then searched for the touch, articulation, balance, and timing that might come close to it.
Heinrich Neuhaus: The Student as an Emerging Artist
With Heinrich Neuhaus, piano playing formed part of a broader intellectual and cultural undertaking. A score required historical, emotional, philosophical, and structural understanding. Technique could not be separated from artistic development, because the hands ultimately served an idea.
Heinrich Neuhaus also believed that teachers should cultivate a pupil’s individuality rather than manufacture copies of themselves. The highest success of pedagogy was therefore paradoxical: the teacher should eventually become unnecessary.
Nathan Perelman inherited this principle, expressing it with greater skepticism and mischief. He distrusted classrooms in which professors behaved as though they possessed permanent answers. In his collection of reflections, In the Piano Class, he imagined an alert student confronting the teacher:
“Last lesson you said the opposite—so where is the truth?”
Nathan Perelman did not regard that as insolence. It meant the pupil had begun to think. He could be exacting about a phrase, a pedal change, or the weight of an accent, but his severity was intended to build independence rather than obedience. The pupil was not expected to leave sounding like the professor. The pupil should leave hearing more acutely and judging more independently.
Leonid Nikolayev: The Responsibility of Every Detail
Leonid Nikolayev represented the mature Leningrad piano school. His celebrated circle included Vladimir Sofronitsky (Владимир Софроницкий), Maria Yudina (Мария Юдина), Dmitri Shostakovich (Дмитрий Шостакович), Pavel Serebryakov (Павел Серебряков), Samary Savshinsky (Самарий Савшинский), and Nathan Perelman.
His method was rational without being bloodless. Technique served an artistic purpose. Details had to be understood in relation to the whole, and interpretation demanded an awareness of musical architecture. Expressiveness alone could not make a phrase convincing; the phrase had to make sense within the structure of the work.
Nathan Perelman gave this ethic one of its sharpest expressions in his famous maxim:
“Nothing carries one farther from perfection than approximation.”
By approximation, he did not mean an occasional wrong note. He meant something more dangerous: vague listening disguised as emotion. It was playing “passionately” without understanding what the phrase was doing, or producing a beautiful tone that conveyed the wrong character. Leonid Nikolayev taught accountability: imagination must answer to form, just as emotion must answer to syntax.
Precision Without Pedantry
Nathan Perelman did not leave behind a monumental theoretical system. His best-known book, In the Piano Class, brought together brief observations, paradoxes, warnings, and images. First published in book form in 1970 and later expanded, it resembles its author: concise, unsettling, humorous, and resistant to dogma.
He preferred the needle to the net. One accurately placed remark could remain in a student’s mind for decades.
The Ear Must Be Merciless
He advised musicians to use feeling economically, reason generously, and the ear mercilessly. This was not a demand to suppress emotion. He wanted musicians to stop using emotion as cover for carelessness. Pedaling, articulation, timing, touch, and silence all needed a purpose. A student had to hear whether a sound was attractive, then decide whether it was true to the meaning of the passage.
That distinction separated precision from pedantry. Pedantry worships correctness. Precision listens for necessity.
Music Must Speak
Nathan Perelman often compared performance with spoken language. Notes behaved like words. Phrases carried grammar, accents changed meaning, and pauses could communicate suspense, hesitation, closure, or confusion. He argued that a musician who ignored punctuation understood little more than a reader who treated commas, periods, questions, and exclamations as interchangeable.
Contemporary accounts of his playing also emphasize its speech-like intonation and sharply defined characterization. The pianist had to do more than make the instrument sing. Music had to say something specific.
Resistance Is Part of the Lesson
His classroom was not casually permissive. Nathan Perelman held strong convictions and might reject an interpretation he considered false, sentimental, or tasteless. Yet he distinguished conviction from petrification. A living principle could produce different solutions in different circumstances; a dead rule could only be repeated.
Contradiction did not necessarily indicate failed teaching. It could mean the teacher was responding to the work, the hall, the instrument, or the particular student before him. The deeper lesson was not “Do this every time,” but “Learn why this is necessary now.”
Four Pupils, Four Destinations
A teacher’s reach is not measured solely by the number of pupils who reproduce his manner. It also emerges in the range of futures that his lessons make possible.
Andrei Hoteev: Precision Enters the Archive
After studying with Nathan Perelman at the Leningrad Conservatory, Andrei Hoteev (Андрей Хотеев) continued his training in Moscow with Lev Naumov (Лев Наумов). His later career combined performance with sustained research into composers’ manuscripts, especially those of Modest Mussorgsky (Модест Мусоргский) and Pyotr Tchaikovsky (Пётр Чайковский).
He performed and recorded original or unabridged versions of Tchaikovsky’s works. For his recording of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, he consulted the composer’s autograph and documented differences between the manuscript and familiar printed editions.
It would be simplistic to attribute this scholarship entirely to one teacher. Even so, the continuity is plain. In Andrei Hoteev’s work, Nathan Perelman’s warning against approximation became a refusal to accept inherited editions merely because custom had established them. Exact listening had expanded into exact reading.
Andrei Hoteev was no timid antiquarian. His projects could be theatrical and visually imaginative, drawing on ideas associated with Alexander Scriabin (Александр Скрябин)’s color-light conceptions and Wassily Kandinsky (Василий Кандинский)’s response to Pictures at an Exhibition. Fidelity to the source did not narrow imagination; it gave imagination firmer ground.
Oleg Malov: The Lesson Returns Home
Oleg Malov (Олег Малов) offers the most direct institutional continuation of this lineage. He entered the Leningrad Conservatory in 1965 and first studied with Samary Savshinsky. After Savshinsky’s death, he continued with Nathan Perelman, completing both his principal course and postgraduate training under him.
Oleg Malov later became a professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He combined solo and chamber performance with scholarship, master classes, and advocacy for contemporary music.
The line has an almost architectural shape. Leonid Nikolayev taught both Savshinsky and Nathan Perelman. Oleg Malov moved from one of those pupils to the other, then remained at the same institution to teach another generation. Through him, the tradition survived not only in books and memories but in the classroom, spoken in another voice under different historical conditions.
Leonid Gakkel: The Piano Lesson Becomes Literature
Leonid Gakkel carried the inheritance in a less obvious direction: criticism and prose. A distinguished musicologist and writer, he openly called Nathan Perelman his teacher. His writing preserved facts about concerts, books, and lessons, as well as the man’s atmosphere—the humor, lightness, and subdued melancholy that allowed him to endure history without becoming its monument.
Nathan Perelman taught that music was expressive speech; Leonid Gakkel transformed that principle into speech about music. As an interpreter of interpreters, he gave the fleeting experience of a lesson or performance a literary afterlife.
Andrei Mikita: Tradition Becomes New Work
Composer and pianist Andrei Mikita (Андрей Микита) studied piano with Nathan Perelman and composition with Boris Tishchenko (Борис Тищенко), then continued his education in Moscow. He later became a professor at the Gnessin Academy and the Moscow Conservatory, developing a catalogue that includes cantatas, oratorios, instrumental concertos, and works based on sacred subjects.
His path shows that Nathan Perelman’s classroom was not a closed workshop designed to produce one kind of pianist. It was a junction from which students could move toward composition, teaching, organization, and public musical life.
The association Andrei Mikita later created, “MOST,” takes its name from the idea of “Contemporary Tradition.” Its aim of connecting living composers, performers, and listeners reflects the underlying logic of Nathan Perelman’s teaching: tradition has value only when it leads to new attention and action.
Beyond the Classroom
A lifetime of collaboration strengthened Nathan Perelman’s work as a teacher. In 1927, he toured Soviet cities with violinist Miron Polyakin (Мирон Полякин), and chamber music remained an important part of his career.
Ensemble playing put his values into practice. A musician had to listen beyond his own part, yield without disappearing, answer without overpowering, and recognize the character of another voice. Music became conversation rather than display.
His transcriptions of works by Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (Николай Римский-Корсаков), and Sergei Prokofiev (Сергей Прокофьев) reveal the same imagination. To bring orchestral, operatic, or theatrical music under ten fingers is to translate it: the essential character must be preserved while new physical means of expression are found.
In the 1980s and 1990s, he brought his teaching to a broader public through approximately a decade of Leningrad television programs titled Conversations at the Piano. The private lesson became public, but its basic demand remained the same. Listeners, like performers, had to learn the art of attention.
The Longer Performance
Nathan Perelman taught at the Leningrad–St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1937 until his death in 2002. He became a professor in 1958, headed the special piano department between 1977 and 1981, and remained a professor-consultant for the rest of his life.
Few artistic careers maintained such continuity. Governments changed. The city changed names and changed back. Borders shifted, aesthetic fashions came and went, and institutions learned new political languages. He still returned to the conservatory and listened.
The tradition that reached him through Felix Blumenfeld, Heinrich Neuhaus, and Leonid Nikolayev took a different shape in his classroom. He distilled it into a concentrated ethic: hear exactly, imagine boldly, understand the grammar, and resist borrowed certainty.
His pupils carried different parts of that ethic into different worlds. Andrei Hoteev applied precision to manuscript research. Oleg Malov returned it to the conservatory. Leonid Gakkel translated listening into prose. Andrei Mikita directed it toward composition and the creation of a living contemporary tradition.
Artistic inheritance survives when it becomes useful in new hands rather than staying intact. Nathan Perelman performed for almost 70 years. His longest performance may have begun after each lesson ended, when a student sat alone before a score and wondered whether the beautiful phrase was also the truthful one.
