Vache Umr-Shat was an Armenian piano pedagogue. He was born on 13 March 1922 in Tbilisi and died on 1 April 1998 in Yerevan. He was the son of the composer Vahan Umr-Shat and the translator Ashkhen Umr-Shat. In 1962 he was awarded the title of Honored Teacher of the Armenian SSR.
He graduated from the Tbilisi Conservatory in 1948 as a piano student of Ilya Aizberg and Tamara Charekishvili. He then continued his education in postgraduate study at the Moscow Conservatory after receiving a recommendation from Aram Khachaturian, who highly praised Umr-Shat's performance of his Piano Concerto. However, because of a hand injury, he was unable to continue a performing career.
From 1949 to 1952 Umr-Shat taught at the music college in Leninakan. From 1952 until the end of his life he headed the piano department at the Romanos Melikyan Yerevan Music College. At the same time, from 1963 until the end of his life he taught at the Yerevan Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1992. Beginning in 1960 he also directed the piano section of the methodological office of the Armenian Ministry of Culture.
Together with Georgy Saradjev he published the two-part School of Piano Playing in 1973-1978. According to Shushanik Apoyan, it was essentially the first Armenian piano school in the sense that it was based predominantly on national musical material. Among Umr-Shat's students, the best known is Svetlana Navasardyan, who studied with him both at the music college and at the conservatory and later spoke with exceptional admiration about his role in her artistic life.
Connections
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