Alexander Iokheles

Alexander Iokheles was a Soviet pianist and music teacher, born in Moscow on March 11, 1912, and died there on June 19, 1978. He was the brother of the architect Yevgeny Iokheles.

He graduated from the Gnessin Music College and then from the Moscow Conservatory in 1932, where he studied with Konstantin Igumnov. In 1933 he won second prize at the First All-Union Competition of Performing Musicians.

Iokheles became known as an advocate of expanding the piano repertoire through rare and difficult works. He gave the first performances in Russia of Claude Debussy's Fantasy, Arthur Honegger's Concertino, and Francis Poulenc's Negro Rhapsody. He also often appeared with his own transcriptions; in particular, in 1947 he performed Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 29, the Hammerklavier, Op. 106, in an arrangement for piano and orchestra.

In the 1940s and 1950s he performed as a member of a piano trio with Mark Zatulovsky and Gertz Tsomyk.

From 1946 to 1952 he was a professor at the Tbilisi Conservatory. From 1952 he was a professor, and later head of the piano department, at the Gnessin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute. Among his students were Oleg Maisenberg, Rimma Skorokhodova, Igor Benditsky, Vera Nosina, and Shimon Rukhman, who recalled that Iokheles was a musician by the grace of God, with extraordinary hearing and a brilliant memory, able to sit down at the piano unexpectedly and play Scriabin's Third Symphony from beginning to end by heart.

He lived in Moscow at 43 Leninsky Prospekt and was buried at Danilovskoye Cemetery in Moscow.

Connections

This figure has 3 connections in the Music Lineage catalog.