Gregor Piatigorsky
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Gregor Piatigorsky (April 17, 1903 – August 6, 1976) was a Ukrainian cellist.
Gregor Piatigorsky, or occasionally known as "Grisha," was born in Ekaterinoslav and studied violin and piano with his father as a child. After seeing and hearing the cello, he determined to become a cellist and constructed a play cello with two sticks. He was given a real cello when he was seven.
He won a scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, earning money for his family by playing in local cafés.
The Russian Revolution took place when he was 13. Shortly thereafter he started playing in the Lenin Quartet. At 15, he was hired as the principal cellist for the Bolshoi Theater.
The Russian authorities would not allow him to travel abroad to further his studies, so he smuggled himself and his cello into Poland on a cattle train with a group of artists. One of the women was a rather large soprano who, when the border guards started shooting at them, grabbed Piatigorsky and his cello. The cello did not survive intact, but it was the only casualty.
Now 18, he studied briefly in Berlin and Leipzig, with Hugo Becker and Julius Klengel, playing in a trio in a Russian café to put food on the table. Among the patrctons of the café was Wilhelm Furtwängler, who heard him and hired him as the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic.
In 1929, he first visited the United States, playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic under Willem Mengelberg. In Ann Arbor, Michigan in January of 1937 he married Jacqueline de Rothschild, daughter of Edouard Alphonse de Rothschild of the wealthy Rothschild banking family of France. That fall, after returning to France, they had their first child, Jephta. Following the Nazi occupation in World War II, the family fled the country and settled in Elizabethtown in the Adirondacks Mountains. Their son, Joram was born in Elizabethtown in 1940.
He recorded extensively in a trio with Arthur Rubinstein and Jascha Heifetz and enjoyed playing chamber music privately with Vladimir Horowitz and Nathan Milstein.
From 1941 to 1949, he was head of the cello department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and he also taught at Tanglewood, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, where he remained until his death from lung cancer in Los Angeles, California.
He owned two Stradivarius cellos, the "Batta" and the "Baudiot." It has been reported that the great violin pedagogue, Ivan Galamian, once described Piatigorsky as the greatest string player of all time. He was an extraordinarily dramatic player. His orientation as a performer was to convey the maximum expression embodied in a piece. He brought a great authenticity to his understanding of this expression. He was able communicate this authenticity because he had had extensive personal and professional contact with many of the great composers of the day. Many of those composers wrote pieces for him; composers who included Prokofiev (cello concerto), Hindemith (cello concerto), William Walton (cello concerto), Stravinsky (Piatigorsky and Stravinsky collaborated on the arrangement of Stravinsky's "Suite Italiene" for cello and piano, which was based on music from Stravinsky's "Pulcinella," which, in turn, had been based on earlier music by Pergolesi), and many others. At a rehearsal of Richard Strauss's "Don Quixote," which Piatigorsky performed with the composer conducting, after the dramatic slow variation in d minor, Strauss announced to the orchestra, "Now I've heard my Don Quixote as I imagined him."
Piatigorsky had a magnificent sound characterized by a distinctive fast vibrato and he was able to execute with consummate articulation all manner of extremely difficult bowings, including a downbow staccato that other string players could not help but be in awe of. He often attributed his penchant for drama to his student days when he accepted an engagement playing during the intermissions in recitals by the great Russion basso, Feodor Chaliapin. Chaliapin, who when portraying his dramatic roles, such as Boris Godunov would not only sing, but declaim, almost shouting. On encountering him one day, the young Piatigorsky told him, "You talk too much and don't sing enough." Chaliapin responded, "You sing too much and don't talk enough." Piatigorsky thought about this and from that point on, tried to incorporate the kind of drama and expression he heard in Chaliapin's singing into his own artistic expression.
Piatigorsky also enjoyed playing chess. His wife, Jacqueline, was a strong player who played in several US women's championships and represented the United States in the women's Chess Olympiad. In 1963, the Piatigorskys organized and financed a strong international tournament in Los Angeles, won by Paul Keres and Tigran Petrosian. A second Piatigorsky Cup was held in Santa Monica in 1966, and was won by Boris Spassky.
Gregor Piatigorsky died of lung cancer at his California home in 1976. and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. There has been an excellent book written about him, entitled Grisha: The Story of Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky by M. Bartley, published in 2005.
