Serge Koussevitzky
Serge Koussevitzky (born Sergey Aleksandrovich Kusevitsky;[n 1] Russian: Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий, IPA: [sʲɪrˈɡʲej ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ kʊsʲɪˈvʲitskʲɪj]; 26 July [O.S. 14 July] 1874 – 4 June 1951) was a Russian and American conductor, composer, and double-bassist, known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949.
Serge Koussevitzky
Biography[edit]
Early career[edit]
Koussevitzky was born into a Jewish family of professional musicians in Vyshny Volochyok, Tver Governorate (present-day Tver Oblast), about 250 km northwest of Moscow, Russia.[1] His parents taught him violin, cello, and piano. He also learned trumpet.[2] At the age of fourteen he received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Society,[3] where he studied double bass with Rambusek[2] and music theory. He excelled at the bass, joining the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra at the age of twenty, in 1894, and succeeded his teacher, Rambusek, as the principal bassist in 1901. That same year, according to some sources, he made his début (25 March) as a soloist in Moscow,[2] although his biographer Moses Smith states he made his solo début earlier in 1896;[4] he later won critical acclaim with his first recital in Berlin in 1903. In 1902 he married the dancer Nadezhda Galat. The same year, with Reinhold Glière's help, he wrote a popular concerto for the double bass, which he premiered in Moscow in 1905.[2] In 1905, Koussevitzky divorced Nadezhda and married Natalie Ushkova, the daughter of an extremely wealthy tea merchant.[5] He soon resigned from the Bolshoi, and the couple moved to Berlin, where Serge studied conducting under Arthur Nikisch, using his wife's wealth to pay off his teacher's gambling debts.[6]
Champion of contemporary music[edit]
Koussevitzky was a great champion of modern music, commissioning a number of works from prominent composers. During his time in Paris in the early 1920s he programmed much contemporary music, ensuring well-prepared and good quality performances.[12] Among the well-received premieres were Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody[13] and Albert Roussel's Suite in F.[14]
For the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary, he commissioned Copland's Ode,[n 2] Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 (which Prokofiev later revised), Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as works by Albert Roussel and Howard Hanson.[18] In 1922, Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel's arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 suite for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition, which was premiered on 19 October that year[12] and quickly became the most famous and celebrated orchestration of the work. Koussevitzky held the rights to this version for many years.
In 1940, Koussevitzky commissioned Randall Thompson, then a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the men's Glee club, to write a new piece for performance at Tanglewood. Koussevitzky had a large-scale festival piece in mind, but with World War II underway and France having fallen to Germany, Thompson could not find such an inspiration. Instead, he produced his unaccompanied Alleluia – with the word sung 64 times in the Russian manner – which became his most frequently performed work.