Israel Gusman
Israel Borisovich Gusman was a Soviet and Russian conductor and music teacher. He was born on 18 August 1917 in Nizhny Novgorod, then in the Russian Empire, into the family of the prominent music critic Boris Gusman. His family soon moved to Moscow.
In 1931, Gusman graduated from the Gnesin Music School and entered the military conducting faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. While studying, he began working with the orchestra of the Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre and later with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra.
Gusman served in the Red Army from 1938 to 1940 and was called up again in 1941. From 1942, he took part in the Second World War. In 1943 he became director of the orchestra of the 4th Ukrainian Front, giving concerts for military units and civilian audiences in Ukraine, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Germany. He was a prizewinner at the All-Union Review of Young Conductors in Leningrad in 1946.
From 1947, Gusman led the Kharkiv Philharmonic Orchestra, combining performing work with teaching. Between 1957 and 1987, he directed the symphony orchestra of the Gorky Philharmonic, now the Nizhny Novgorod Philharmonic. He was one of the principal organizers of the Soviet Union's first Contemporary Music festival, held regularly from 1962. Mstislav Rostropovich and Vladimir Spivakov studied conducting with him.
In 1963 and 1964, Gusman worked as a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre, conducting productions of Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades and Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. During the same period, he appeared as a guest conductor with major Soviet symphonic ensembles, including the State Orchestra, the Central Television Grand Symphony Orchestra, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, and the state orchestras of Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic republics. He also performed abroad on several occasions.
Gusman was named People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1978 and became a professor at the Gorky Conservatory in 1981. He was made an Honorary Citizen of Nizhny Novgorod Oblast in 1996 and received the Nizhny Novgorod Prize in 1997.
He died in Nizhny Novgorod on 29 January 2003 and was buried in Bugrovskoye Cemetery. A memorial plaque was installed on the house where he lived from 1970 to 2003 on Varvarskaya Street in Nizhny Novgorod in 2004.