Nikolai Rabinovich

Nikolai Semyonovich Rabinovich (24 September [7 October] 1908 – 26 July 1972) was a Soviet conductor and teacher, and a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory. He was born in St. Petersburg in the Russian Empire and died in Leningrad. He was the brother of the musicologist A. S. Rabinovich.

He studied conducting with Nikolai Malko and graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in 1931 in the class of Aleksandr Gauk. In the same year he made his conducting debut at the Leningrad Philharmonic. He had already encountered the philharmonic orchestra while still a student, when in 1929 he provided musical accompaniment for the first films of Lenfilm.

In 1931–1932 he worked at the Lenfilm studio as head of the music department and took part as a conductor in the creation of the first sound films. From 1933 to 1938 he headed the music sector of Leningrad Radio. His name appears in the credits of films using music by Dmitri Shostakovich, including One, Son of Mongolia, the Maxim trilogy, Golden Mountains, The Gadfly, and Hamlet.

From 1938 he was a conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic, and in 1944–1948 he worked with the Leningrad Maly Opera Theatre. In 1950 he became head of the Grand Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad Radio Committee and worked with it for seven years, and from 1967 he led the Leningrad Chamber Orchestra.

Rabinovich was one of the founders of the Soviet conducting school. Possessing a high performance culture, he conducted works from the classical, contemporary Soviet, and foreign repertory, and also directed productions of opera and operetta. Under his baton were performed all of Beethoven's symphonic works, many compositions by Haydn and Mozart, almost all orchestral works by Schubert and Tchaikovsky, music by Schumann and Verdi, Berlioz and Bizet, Bruckner and Mahler, Dvorak and Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, as well as works by Balanchivadze, Karayev, and Khachaturian. He also conducted productions in the musical theaters of Leningrad.

Rabinovich taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1939 and became a professor there in 1968. He trained a number of well-known conductors, among them Yuri Simonov, Neeme Jarvi, Vitaly Kutsenko, Rauf Abdullayev, and Leo Korkhin. A special part of his biography was his work with the conservatory's student orchestra, of which he was the permanent curator from 1956 until his death. One of the classrooms of the Leningrad Conservatory was named after him.

He also toured in the German Democratic Republic and in 1970 took part in an international seminar for conductors in Weimar. He was buried at Serafimovskoe Cemetery.

Connections

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