Igor Bezrodny

Igor Bezrodny was a Soviet violinist, conductor, and teacher. He was born on May 7, 1930, in Tiflis, and died on September 30, 1997, in Helsinki. A soloist of the Moscow Philharmonic, he later became a professor at the Moscow Conservatory named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky, chief conductor of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, and chief conductor of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra in Finland. He was awarded the Stalin Prize, Third Class, in 1951, won first prizes at the Prague Spring International Competition in 1949 and the Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in 1950, and was named People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1978.

He was born into a family of violin teachers. His father, Semyon Bezrodny, was concertmaster at the Tbilisi Opera and the Tbilisi Philharmonic Orchestra, taught at the Tbilisi Conservatory, and later worked at the Ippolitov-Ivanov Music School in Moscow. His mother, Tatyana Pogozheva, sister of the pianist Tamara Pogozheva, had been a student of Semyon Bezrodny and became a noted violin teacher at the Ippolitov-Ivanov Music School. She also developed a system of early musical education for children on the violin and worked extensively with this method in Finland.

Bezrodny began studying the violin in early childhood. He graduated from the Central Music School attached to the Moscow Conservatory, then completed his studies at the Moscow Conservatory named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky in 1953. In 1955 he finished postgraduate studies there in the class of Abram Yampolsky.

From 1948 he was a soloist of the Moscow Philharmonic. He won first prizes at major international competitions, including Prague Spring in Prague in 1949 and the Johann Sebastian Bach Competition in Leipzig in 1950. He toured widely in the Soviet Union and abroad. Beginning in 1965, for more than a decade, he performed in a trio with the pianist Dmitry Bashkirov and the cellist Mikhail Khomitser, while gradually devoting more time to teaching and conducting.

In 1955 he joined the faculty of the Moscow Conservatory named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky. He became a professor there in 1972 and head of department in 1981. He made his conducting debut in Irkutsk in 1967 and in Moscow in 1970. From 1977 to 1981 he served as artistic director of the Moscow Chamber Orchestra.

From 1981 he lived in Finland. Between 1986 and 1990 he was chief conductor of the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra, and from 1991 he was a professor at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. In the last years of his life he often performed together with his second wife, the Estonian violinist Mari Tampere, who had also been his student.

Bezrodny was also the author of a number of violin transcriptions. He co-authored the book The Pedagogical Method of Professor A. I. Yampolsky with V. Yu. Grigoryev, published in Moscow in 1995.

Connections

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