Vladimir Tsybin
Vladimir Tsybin was a Russian and Soviet flutist, composer, conductor, and music teacher. Born in Ivanovo-Voznesensk on 23 July 1877, he became a professor at the Moscow and St. Petersburg conservatories and is regarded as a founder of the Russian school of flute playing. He received the title Honored Artist of the Republic in 1925 and was named Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1946.
Raised in a musical family, Tsybin began studying the piccolo and singing in a military band in 1886. From 1889 to 1895 he studied flute with Vladimir Krechmann at the Moscow Conservatory. He played in the Korsh Theatre orchestra and joined the Bolshoi Theatre as a piccolo player in 1896, later becoming a flute soloist. In 1907 he moved to St. Petersburg and won the flute-soloist position at the Mariinsky Theatre, where he remained until 1920. In 1909 he performed in Paris with the theatre company during Sergei Diaghilev’s Russian Seasons.
While working at the Mariinsky, Tsybin studied composition and conducting at the St. Petersburg Conservatory from 1910 to 1914. Alexander Glazunov taught him composition, Anatoly Lyadov taught him score reading, and Nikolai Tcherepnin taught him conducting. After the death of flutist Fyodor Stepanov in 1914, Tsybin took over his flute class at the Petrograd Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1917. He also worked as an assistant to Mariinsky ballet conductor Riccardo Drigo.
Tsybin returned to Moscow in 1920. With his wife, Elizaveta, he established a music-and-art home for children in Pushkino and led it for about ten years. He wrote an opera production and a textbook on elementary music theory for the school. From 1921 to 1929 he was a soloist at the Bolshoi Theatre; from 1923 he headed the flute class at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught until his death. He also led the conservatory’s wind-instrument department during the Second World War and taught at its affiliated music school from 1938 to 1948.
As a performer, Tsybin was known for his expressive sound, range of tone colors, and technical command of the flute. He toured in Russia and performed in Paris, appearing under conductors including Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss, Sergei Koussevitzky, Emil Paur, and Nikolai Golovanov. He played the Boehm-system flute and also knew the fingering of simpler flute systems.
Tsybin wrote extensively for flute, including three Concert Allegros, an Andante, a Tarantella, concert studies, and works for flute ensembles. His other compositions included a symphony, a ballet suite, a cantata, symphonic poems, and the operas The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Knights and Flengo. He also wrote concertos for clarinet, harp, oboe, trumpet, and horn. His 1940 textbook, The Fundamentals of Flute Technique, set out his teaching methods. His students included Nikolai Platonov, Boris Trizno, Yuliy Yagudin, Alexander Korneev, and Grigory Madatov. Tsybin died in Moscow on 29 May 1949.