Samary Savshinsky

Samary Ilyich Savshinsky was a Russian Soviet pianist and music teacher. He was born in St. Petersburg on July 6, 1891, and died in Leningrad on October 19, 1968. In 1923 he became a professor at the Leningrad Conservatory.

He was born into the family of the musician Ilya (Elya) Sergeyevich Savshinsky and his wife Anna (Khana) Semyonovna Savshinskaya, née Tabakina. He studied at the Petrograd Conservatory and was a pupil of Leonid Nikolayev; later he wrote a biography of his teacher, published in 1960 as

Leonid Vladimirovich Nikolayev. An Essay on His Life and Creative Activity

Because of the revolutionary events in Petrograd in 1917, the financial position of the Savshinsky family worsened, and they moved to the Kuban. In February 1918 Savshinsky also left Petrograd to join his family. In 1918 he took a position at the Rostov Lower Don Conservatory of the Russian Musical Society.

Although he was little known as a concert performer, he became a major pedagogue and methodologist. He headed the secondary specialized music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory, chaired the piano department, and from 1941 served as dean of the piano faculty. His students included Lazar Berman, Moses Khalfin, Oleg Karavaychuk, Vitaly Margulis, Mark Taimanov, Georgy Saradzhev, Mikhail Bank, and Natalia Korykhalova.

Savshinsky wrote a number of pedagogical manuals, including

The Pianist and His Work

The Regimen and Hygiene of the Pianist

The Pianist's Work on a Musical Composition

The Pianist's Work on Technique

He was married to Lidiya Viktorovna Bylim-Kolosovskaya. Their son, Mark Savshinsky, died of meningitis in 1929. After the death of his first wife in 1952, he married for a second time, to the young pianist A. E. Milyavskaya.

On February 21, 1938, he was awarded the Order of the Badge of Honour in connection with the 75th anniversary of the Leningrad Conservatory and for outstanding merits in the training of musical personnel. He was buried at Serafimovskoe Cemetery in St. Petersburg.

Connections

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