Natalia Korykhalova was a Soviet and Russian music educator and professor. She was also a musicologist and philologist. She was born in Leningrad on February 1, 1929, and died in Saint Petersburg on November 8, 2013. She received the title Honored Worker of Higher Education of the Russian Federation.
Korykhalova graduated from the Special Ten-Year Music School at the Leningrad Conservatory in 1947, studying piano with K. G. Schmidt. In 1955, she graduated with honors from the conservatory’s piano faculty, where she studied with S. I. Savshinsky. While studying piano, she also pursued Romance languages at Leningrad University, graduating with honors in 1954; she completed postgraduate study there in 1957.
After working at the Pushkin House from 1957 to 1958, she taught at the N. K. Krupskaya Leningrad Institute of Culture from 1958 to 1966. She joined the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1966 and remained there until her death, becoming a professor in 1977. For more than thirty years, she taught piano-teaching methods, the history of piano art, piano repertoire, and piano performance. She also supervised student teaching and diploma research, and taught professional-development courses. From 1977 to 1979, she served as the conservatory’s vice-rector for research.
Korykhalova lectured and led piano master classes, including at the Paris Conservatory in 1997 and the Luxembourg Conservatory in 2000. She presented the concert series “Performance Skills of Leningrad Pianists” and introduced concerts in a series devoted to French music. She also appeared on radio and television, including in a 1997 series of talks about Russian pianists broadcast by Paris radio.
She defended a dissertation in Romance philology in 1959 and another in musical art in 1971. Her more than 100 scholarly and methodological publications addressed musical interpretation, piano and vocal performance, pedagogy, musical aesthetics, composition, music education, and Romance linguistics. Her books included Interpretation of Music, Musical Performance Terms, and Behind the Second Piano. A study of Beethoven’s 32 Variations in C Minor was published after her death. She also wrote more than 100 music-critical articles and reviews, collected in In Conversation with Music: Articles and Reviews from Different Years (2011), and supervised nine candidates of science. She spoke French, English, German, and Italian, and read Polish and Spanish.