Vitol'd Platonovich Portugalov, also known as Vitaly Platonovich Portugalov, was a Soviet violinist and music teacher. He was born in 1896 into the family of the physician Platon Gershevich (Grigoryevich) Portugalov, a graduate of the Imperial Saint Vladimir University of Kyiv who opened a private medical practice in Rostov in 1880, and Anna Ilyinichna Portugalova. From childhood he limped because of a deformity of one lower limb.
Portugalov graduated from the Petrograd Conservatory, where he studied with Leopold Auer. He later taught at the Leningrad Conservatory, including during its evacuation to Tashkent in the Second World War.
After the war he became a professor first at the Yerevan Conservatory and then at the Gorky Conservatory. In 1957 the rector of the latter, Grigory Dombayev, wrote that the conservatory had received an enormous contribution from the prematurely deceased major Soviet violin pedagogue Professor V. P. Portugalov, who trained a group of excellent violinists and professionally organized the work of the department of orchestral instruments.
One of his students, Roman Kofman, remembered him as a formidable and mysterious teacher who inspired fear in young students. Kofman recalled his fluent French, his pipe smoking, his striking appearance, and the severe limp that marked his bearing. He also remembered that Portugalov refused an apartment and lived in the conservatory itself, in the same classroom where he taught his deeply devoted students.
Portugalov died on 21 April 1956. He was buried at Bugrovskoye Cemetery, but the burial site has been lost. Since 1935 his wife was the music teacher Berta Reingbald.
Connections
This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.