Sergei Alexandrovich Kusevitsky

Sergei Alexandrovich Kusevitsky

Sergei Alexandrovich Koussevitzky ( Russian Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий . Scientific transliteration: Sergei Aleksandrovich Kusevickij; and Serge Koussevitzky ; * 14 ^{. Jul} / 26. July  1874 ^greg. In vyshny volochyok ; † 4 June 1951 in Boston ) was a Russian - US -american conductor , composer and double bass player .

Childhood and youth

Kussewizki came from a humble background from a Jewish family. He grew up in Vyshny Volotschok, a small town in Tver Oblast , about 250 km northwest of Moscow . His parents were professional musicians. They taught him the violin, violoncello and piano. At the age of 14, Kusevitsky left his hometown to study music in Moscow.

Robert Sterl : Kussewitzky conducts , 1910

Promoter of Russian music

By marrying the daughter of a wealthy tea merchant, he was given the opportunity to realize his dream of conducting. Kussewizki lived in Berlin from around 1905 and made his conducting debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker on January 23, 1908 . The performance included the 2nd Piano Concerto by Rachmaninoff , who played at this performance himself. In 1909 Kussewizki founded the music publisher Editions Russes de Musique and published works by Stravinsky , Rachmaninov, Prokofiev , Medtner and Scriabin . In 1910 he rented a steamboat for the first time and played with an orchestra he had put together and financed in 19 locations along the Volga. Two further tours followed in 1912 and 1914. After the war and the revolution , Kusevitsky led the State Symphony Orchestra in Petrograd (today: St. Petersburg ) for three years , but left the Soviet Union for good in the early 1920s. Via Berlin he came to Paris, where in 1921 he founded the Concerts Symphoniques Koussevitzky series . Here, too, he mainly devoted himself to Russian composers. A milestone in music history was the premiere of the orchestrated version of Modest Mussorgski's piano cycle Pictures at an Exhibition , which Maurice Ravel had created for Kussewizki.

American music patron

Kusewizki was music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949 . In 1943 he commissioned Béla Bartók for a "composition for orchestra". Bartók then composed his Concerto for Orchestra , the premiere of which was an enormous success by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on December 1, 1944 in the Symphony Hall in Boston under Kusevizky.

In 1937, Kussewizki founded the Tanglewood Music Festival, one of the most outstanding music events in the USA. In 1951 he invited the young conductor Lorin Maazel to Tanglewood. This is where Leonard Bernstein , among others, started his career, with whom Kussewizki had an almost fatherly relationship.

Double bass virtuoso

Because Kussewizki needed a scholarship and one was only available for the double bass class, he began to study this instrument. His teacher Josef Rambousek came from Prague and, like Franz Simandl or Gustav Láska, was a student of the pedagogue Josef Hrabě . After completing his studies, Kussewizki was engaged as a double bass player in the orchestra of the Bolshoi Theater and has already performed as a virtuoso. In 1903 he made his debut in Germany. His solo programs consisted of original compositions for double bass, e.g. B. by Giovanni Bottesini and Gustav Láska, and arrangements of other instrumental concertos for double bass, including Mozart's bassoon concerto KV 191 and Max Bruch's Kol Nidrei op.47 .

He composed some pieces for double bass that are still very popular today. These are Andante cantabile and Valse miniature op.1, Berceuse and Chanson Triste op.2, the Concerto in F sharp minor op.3 (orchestrated by Wolfgang Meyer-Tormin ) and the Humoresque op.4.

Kusewizki owned many valuable instruments, including double basses by Maggini , Guarneri and Amati . For his solo appearances, however, he mostly used a double bass from Glässel & Herbig from Markneukirchen in Saxony . His Amati double bass is much better known today. The instrument, built in 1611, was once owned by Domenico Dragonetti . After Kussewizki's death, his widow, Olga, passed the double bass on to the American virtuoso Gary Karr .

With his increasing occupation as a conductor, the virtuoso career faded into the background. Kusewizki continued to perform with the double bass, albeit to a lesser extent. He was the first double bass player to record a record. In the early 1920s he recorded his own compositions as well as works by Gustav Láska and Henry Eccles . In 1929 he gave his last public concert as a double bass soloist in Boston. In 1934 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

literature

• Ingo Burghausen: The importance of Sergej Kussewitzky as a double bass player and composer. Unpublished diploma thesis, Weimar 1988
• Ingo Burghausen: double bass player and conductor. Sergej Kussewitzky on the 40th anniversary of his death on June 4, 1991 . In: Das Orchester, Volume 39 (1991), Issue 6, pp. 691–694
• David Heyes: The Boston bassist . In: Double Bassist No. 2, Autumn / Winter 1996, pp. 10-15
• Susanne Kaulich: Play when I touch the air above! On the 50th anniversary of the death of Russian conductor Serge Koussevitzky . In: Das Orchester, Volume 49 (2001), Issue 6, pp. 8-14
• Moses Smith: Koussevitzky . Allen, Towne and Heath, New York 1947
• Friedrich Warnecke: Ad Infinitum. The double bass. Its history and its future. Problems and their solution for enhancing the double bass playing . Reprint, p. 44 f., Edition intervalle, Leipzig 2005, ISBN 3-938601-00-0
• Serge Kussevitzky , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 24/1951 from June 4, 1951, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Serge Koussevitzky  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Serge Koussevitzky in the catalog of the German National Library