Yevgeny Mravinsky

Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Mravinsky was a Soviet conductor, pianist, and music teacher. He was born in St. Petersburg on June 4, 1903, into a noble family. He was a nephew of the opera singer Yevgenia Mravina, and from early childhood his parents introduced him to piano playing and took him to the theater for opera and symphonic concerts.

He studied at the 2nd St. Petersburg Gymnasium and later at the natural sciences faculty of Petrograd University, but left the university because he could not combine his studies with work as a mime performer at the Mariinsky Theatre. From 1921 he worked as a pianist-accompanist at the Leningrad Choreographic School, where he thoroughly mastered the complex technique of classical dance; from 1929 to 1931 he was head of the school's musical department. In 1923 he studied with I. A. Vishnevsky of the Leningrad State Academic Capella, and from 1924 to 1931 he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory, first in composition and, from 1927, in conducting.

From 1932 to 1938 Mravinsky was a conductor at the Mariinsky Theatre, working mainly in the ballet repertoire. In 1938, after winning first prize at the First All-Union Conductors' Competition in Moscow, he became chief conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra, a position he held for fifty years. In 1940 he made his Moscow debut.

Mravinsky gave the first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich's Sixth Symphony in 1939. He also led first performances of such works as Sergei Prokofiev's Sixth Symphony and Aram Khachaturian's Symphony-Poem, and he conducted many premieres of Shostakovich's symphonies, including the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, Ninth, and Tenth, as well as the oratorio Song of the Forests. During the Second World War, after the outbreak of war, the orchestra was evacuated to Novosibirsk, where it gave 538 concerts. In September 1944 he returned with the orchestra to Leningrad.

He toured widely abroad with the orchestra, including visits to Finland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Poland, and other countries of Western Europe; later the orchestra toured abroad roughly every two years, including multiple visits to Austria and Japan. His last foreign tours took place in 1984, and his final concert was on March 6, 1987, in the Grand Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic.

Among his recordings were works by Beethoven, Brahms, Bruckner, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, Schubert, and Honegger. After 1961 he made no studio recordings, and later recordings were made from live concerts. One of his most important studio recordings, the last three symphonies of Tchaikovsky, was made for Deutsche Grammophon in 1960. He taught at the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad Conservatory in 1936-1937 and again from 1961, becoming a professor in 1963.

Mravinsky received many distinctions, including first prize at the 1938 All-Union Conductors' Competition, the title Hero of Socialist Labour in 1973, People's Artist of the USSR in 1954, the Stalin Prize First Class in 1946, and the Lenin Prize in 1961. In 1982 he became an honorary member of the Vienna Society of Friends of Music. According to a 2010 poll by BBC Music Magazine, he ranked seventeenth among the twenty greatest conductors of all time.

He died in Leningrad on January 19, 1988, and was buried at the Bogoslovskoye Cemetery. His published legacy also includes diaries from 1918 to 1987, later prepared for publication and issued in book form.

Connections

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