Evgeny Levitan was a Soviet and Russian pianist and music pedagogue. He was born on 9 December 1943 in Leningrad and died on 30 August 2025 in Chelyabinsk. He was a student of Berta Marants and Stanislav Neuhaus, was awarded the title Honored Artist of the Russian Federation, held a professorship, and was a laureate of the Russian Performing Art Foundation Prize.
He was born in besieged Leningrad into a family of doctors: pediatrician Evgeniya Ivanovna Vvedenskaya and surgeon Alexander Davydovich Levitan. During the Great Patriotic War his father headed the city sanitary defense department and, after the lifting of the siege, a department of a front-line hospital. On his mother's side, Levitan was a nephew of the poet Alexander Vvedensky. The family lived in the P. M. Mulkhanov apartment house on Syezzhinskaya Street. His mother died in 1946 from the consequences of siege-related tuberculosis, and his father died in 1948 from the consequences of wartime wounds.
During his mother's illness in 1946, he was taken to Orsk to live with his grandmother Vera Markovna Levitan. In Orsk he studied at a music school in the class of Irina Deringer and Evgeniya Guber. He later graduated from the Gorky Conservatory in the piano class of Berta Marants and completed postgraduate study at the Moscow Conservatory in the class of Stanislav Neuhaus.
From 1973 Levitan taught at the Ural Conservatory named after M. P. Mussorgsky, where for a number of years he served as head of the special piano department. From 2005 he was head of the special piano department at the Chelyabinsk State Academy of Culture and Arts. More than twenty of his students became laureates of international competitions.
As a pianist, he gave concerts in Russia and abroad. He was also the author of major works about Stanislav Neuhaus and Berta Marants, published by central publishing houses. He served as chairman and jury member of a number of piano competitions in Russia and abroad and founded the International Stanislav Neuhaus Piano Competition, first held in Chelyabinsk in April 2007.
In 2025 he visited the former family apartment on Syezzhinskaya Street, where the OBERIU Museum was being prepared, and donated a family album of the Povolotsky and Vvedensky families and a porcelain vase. After his death, his son Boris Levitan donated his father's grand piano to the museum. Levitan died in Chelyabinsk and was buried at Serafimovskoye Cemetery in Saint Petersburg on 3 September 2025.
Connections
This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.