Alexander Mogilevsky

Alexander Yakovlevich Mogilevsky was a Russian violinist. He was born in 1885, most likely in Odessa, although some sources give Uman as his birthplace, then in the Kherson Governorate of the Russian Empire. He died in 1955 in Tokyo, Japan.

He received his initial musical education at the Odessa Music School with G. L. Freeman, and later studied in Rostov-on-Don with V. Z. Salin. In 1898 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied with N. N. Sokolovsky and Jan Hřímalý, graduating from the violin class in 1909. He also studied at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory from 1905 to 1906 with Leopold Auer.

In Moscow, Mogilevsky founded a popular string quartet and gained a reputation as both a virtuoso violinist and an ensemble player. He was associated with important musical figures of his time, was on friendly terms with Alexander Scriabin, and collaborated with Serge Koussevitzky. A diary entry by Leo Tolstoy from 1 May 1909 mentions a performance by Mogilevsky and the pianist Rosa Pasternak, in which they played Beethoven's Eighth Violin Sonata, two movements from Mozart sonatas, a Mozart minuet, and a Bach aria.

In 1910 he became a professor at the Music and Drama School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. From 1920 to 1921 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where his students included Dmitri Tsyganov. In the same years he led the State Stradivari Quartet.

From 1922 onward, Mogilevsky was active internationally as a touring musician and also taught at the Russian Conservatory in Paris. In the early 1930s he emigrated to Japan, where he became professor at the Kunitachi and Teikoku music institutes and taught at the Tokyo Conservatory. He is regarded as having played a significant role in the formation of the Japanese violin school, and among his best-known students were Shinichi Suzuki and Nejiko Suwa.

A monograph about him, The Soul of Music, written by his student, the Japanese violinist Kiyoshi Kato, was published in Tokyo in 1966. Mogilevsky's second wife, whom he married in 1929, was the pianist Nadezhda Nikolayevna Leichtenbergskaya. She accompanied him during their world tour, which began with concerts in Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Japan. They divorced in 1938.

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