Leonid Kogan

Leonid Kogan was a Soviet violinist and teacher. He was born on November 14, 1924, in Yekaterinoslav, now Dnipro, Ukraine, in the family of a photographer.

From 1933 he studied in Moscow in a special children's group, and from 1936 at the Central Music School attached to the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory in the class of Abram Yampolsky. He later graduated from the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory with the same teacher in 1948 and completed postgraduate studies there in 1953.

From 1944 Kogan was a soloist of the Moscow Philharmonic. From 1952 until the end of his life he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, becoming professor in 1963 and head of the violin department in 1969. Among his students were a number of notable violinists, including Andrei Korsakov, Nikolai Yashvili, Ilya Grubert, Vladimir Zhuk, Irina Medvedeva, Viktoria Mullova, and Valery Igolinsky.

He was one of the brightest representatives of the Soviet violin school and was associated with its “romantic-virtuoso” branch. He performed constantly and, beginning already in his conservatory years, toured widely abroad; from 1951 he appeared in many countries, including Australia, Austria, England, Belgium, East Germany, Italy, Canada, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, the United States, West Germany, France, and countries of Latin America.

His repertoire covered the principal areas of violin literature in roughly equal proportion, including contemporary music. Aram Khachaturian's Concerto-Rhapsody, violin concertos by Tikhon Khrennikov, Kara Karayev, Mieczyslaw Weinberg, and André Jolivet were dedicated to him, and Dmitri Shostakovich began composing his unrealized third concerto for Kogan. He was regarded as an unsurpassed interpreter of works by Niccolò Paganini and also of virtuoso miniatures by Henryk Wieniawski, Pablo Sarasate, Fritz Kreisler, Franz Waxman, and brilliant violin transcriptions. Critics wrote of him as a talent “born with a violin in his hands,” and the world press called him the “Soviet Paganini.”

Kogan also appeared with his family ensemble; in 1966 the Italian composer Franco Mannino flew in for a concert by Leonid Kogan, his wife Elizaveta, and their son Pavel, at which they performed Mannino's Concerto for Three Violins. From 1958 to 1974 Kogan served on the juries of several international competitions, and in 1978 and 1982 he was chairman of the jury of the International Tchaikovsky Competition.

His distinctions included first prize at the International Competition of the World Festival of Youth and Students in Prague in 1947 and first prize at the first Queen Elisabeth International Competition in Brussels in 1951. He was named Merited Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1955, People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1964, People's Artist of the USSR in 1966, and received the Lenin Prize in 1965 for his concert-performing activity of 1962–1964. In 1982 he also became an honorary member of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Leonid Kogan died on December 17, 1982, from a heart attack near Moscow, in Mytishchi, during a train journey from Moscow to a concert in Yaroslavl, where he was to perform with his son. He was buried in Moscow at the Novodevichy Cemetery. His legacy was later honored with a bust unveiled in the foyer of the Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory in 2014, a commemorative plaque opened there in 2019, and a five-disc anniversary edition of his performances released by Melodiya in 2019. In 2023 the book Leonid Kogan. Letters, containing his correspondence from 1942 to 1982, was published.

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