Matvey Presman was a Russian and Soviet pianist and music teacher. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1891 with a silver medal and the title of free artist, studying piano with Nikolai Zverev and Vasily Safonov. He was a fellow student of Sergei Rachmaninoff and later wrote about that period in “A Corner of Musical Moscow in the 1880s.” On Safonov’s advice, Presman traveled to Germany to study the organization of music education.
Presman was appointed director of the Tbilisi Music School and lived with his parents in Tbilisi. From 1891 to 1895, he served there as a senior teacher. In 1896, he became director of the Russian Musical Society’s music classes in Rostov-on-Don, which became a music college in 1900. Under his leadership, they were transformed into the Rostov Imperial Musical College. He resigned in 1912 after a dispute with the local administration.
From 1913, Presman was a professor at the Saratov Conservatory, described in the article as the first conservatory in the Russian provinces. He returned to teaching in Rostov-on-Don in 1918 and taught at the Baku Conservatory in 1921–1922. His wife, opera singer Ekaterina Marshad-Presman, was also a professor there. Among his students in Baku was pianist and musicologist Nathan Fishman.
Presman moved to Moscow in 1923 and taught at the Central Correspondence Music-Pedagogical Institute. In 1933, he became director of the M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov Music College in Moscow. He died in Moscow in November 1941.