Gregor Piatigorsky

The late Serge Koussevitzky once said that GREGOR PIATIGORSKY was “ the greatest cellist of our day.”Born in the Ukraine in 1903, Dr. Piatigorsky was appointed first cellist of the Imperial Opera Orchestra in Moscow at the age of fifteen. With the outbreak of the Revolution in 1919 he left Moscow, and for five years endured untold hardships, until in 1924 he was “ discovered" for the second time by Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Furtwängler. The following account of his early years is drawn from a forthcoming autobiography by Gregor Piatigorsky to be published by Doubleday & Company, Inc.

The late Serge Koussevitzky once said that GREGOR PIATIGOKSKY was “the greatest cellist of our day.” Born in the Ukraine in 1903, Mr. Piatigorsky was appointed first cellist of the Imperial Opera Orchestra in Moscow at the extraordinary age of fifteen. With the outbreak of the Revolution in 1919 he left Moscow, and for a number of years he was reduced to playing in cafés and theaters in Warsaw and Berlin to keep body and soul together. Ifis tribulations finally came to an end in 1924, when he was ”discovered” for a second time by Artur Schnabel and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Since 1929 he has made his home in this country.