Alexander Blum was a Russian and Soviet violinist and violist, born in Kerch on February 9, 1885. From 1899 to 1905, he studied violin at the Kharkiv Music School with Konstantin Gorsky. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1910, where he studied violin with Ivan Grzhimali and chamber music with Vasily Safonov. In 1912, he completed a law degree at Moscow University.
Blum played with the orchestra of the Moscow branch of the Imperial Russian Musical Society from 1905, at Sergei Vasilenko’s Historical Concerts from 1907 to 1917, and in Sergei Koussevitzky’s concerts from 1909. He also worked with the Nezlobin Theatre and the Moscow Art Theatre, and played viola in a quartet led by Boris Sibor. He was a member of the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra from 1909 to 1919 and again from 1923 to 1929, serving as principal violist. From 1930 until his death, he played in the All-Union Radio Symphony Orchestra.
Blum performed under many conductors, including Sergei Rachmaninoff, whose conducting he greatly admired. He recalled working with Rachmaninoff on Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, Borodin’s Prince Igor, and Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. Conductors who valued his playing included Vasily Suk, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov, Maximilian Steinberg, Sergei Vasilenko, Alexander Melik-Pashayev, and Nikolai Golovanov.
In 1906, Blum founded a private music school in Moscow, where he taught until it closed in 1918. From 1912 or 1913, he also taught at the Zograf-Plaksina Music School, and from 1919 to 1921 he taught violin at a music school in Simferopol. He and his wife, pianist Ekaterina von Mansfeld, gave many concerts together in Moscow and other cities, often performing works by Scandinavian composers, including Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius, Selim Palmgren, Christian Sinding, Toivo Kuula, and Erkki Melartin. Blum died in Moscow in 1939.
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