Samuil Feinberg

Samuil Yevgen'yevich Feinberg (Odesa, 1890 – Moscow, 1962) was one of the most respected pianists of Soviet Russia and, at the same time, a composer whose complex output enjoyed only limited dissemination. Born into a family of Jewish origin, he moved with his parents to Moscow in 1894, where he trained at the conservatory under Gol'denveyzer, graduating in 1911. He also received private composition lessons from Zhilyayev.

After his first years as a performer and composer, in 1914 he was posted to the Polish front, but fell seriously ill and ended up contracting typhus in a military hospital. He spent the rest of the world war recovering in Moscow. In 1922 he obtained the piano chair at the Moscow conservatory and frequented the circle that met in the flat of Pavel Lamm, where he came into contact with Myaskovsky and Anatoly Aleksandrov, who dedicated works to him. During the second half of the 1920s he achieved considerable success abroad, giving concerts in Italy, Austria and Germany, and his Sixth Sonata aroused great interest at the ISCM Festival in Venice in 1925. His performances outside the Soviet Union appear to have ceased by around mid-1929. In the 1930s he served on the juries of several international competitions. He suffered from heart problems from 1951 onwards, but continued to perform, record and compose until a few days before his death.

As a pianist he was considered the equal of Gol'denveyzer, Sofronitsky, Neuhaus and Ginzburg. He commanded a broad repertoire, from The Well-Tempered Clavier, which he was the first Russian pianist to perform in its entirety in public, to Beethoven's 32 sonatas and much of Chopin, Schumann and Scriabin. His playing was characterised by clarity, quality of legato and rhythmic subtlety, although Prokofiev judged his interpretations to be overly nervous and romantic.

In his works he distinguished very different stages. The early sonatas draw on Scriabin and, to a lesser extent, on Schumann; the Fourth Sonata (1918) shows a very personal style, assimilating atonal experimentation and a notable contrapuntal technique. The Sixth and Seventh sonatas are perhaps considered his peaks. After a brief experiment with twelve-tone serialism in the mid-1920s, his later evolution moved towards an almost diatonic polyphonic language. His legacy is that of a creator who, through his own reluctance to promote himself and the political circumstances of the 1930s, remained largely on the margins, although his intellectual rigour continues to attract interest.