Serge Koussevitzky (born Sergey Aleksandrovich Kusevitsky; Russian: Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий; IPA: [sʲɪrˈɡʲej ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ kʊsʲɪˈvʲitskʲɪj]; July 26, 1874 [Old Style July 14] – June 4, 1951) was a Russian and American conductor, composer, and double bass player. He is best known for his long time working as the music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949.

Biography

Koussevitzky was born into a Jewish family of professional musicians in Vyshny Volochyok, a region in Russia called Tver Governorate, about 250 kilometers (160 miles) northwest of Moscow. His parents taught him to play the violin, cello, piano, and trumpet. At age fourteen, he received a scholarship to study at the Musico-Dramatic Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. There, he learned to play the double bass with a teacher named Rambusek and studied music theory. He became very skilled at the double bass and joined the Bolshoi Theatre orchestra at age twenty in 1894. In 1901, he became the principal bassist, taking over from his teacher, Rambusek. Some sources say he gave his first solo performance in Moscow on March 25, 1901, but his biographer, Moses Smith, claims he performed earlier, in 1896. He later received praise for his first recital in Berlin in 1903. In 1902, he married a dancer named Nadezhda Galat. That same year, with the help of composer Reinhold Glière, he wrote a popular concerto for the double bass, which he performed in Moscow in 1905. In 1905, he divorced Nadezhda and married Natalie Ushkova, the daughter of a wealthy tea merchant. He left the Bolshoi Theatre and moved to Berlin, where he studied conducting with Arthur Nikisch. He used his wife’s money to pay off his teacher’s gambling debts.

In Berlin, Koussevitzky continued to give double bass recitals. After practicing conducting at home with a student orchestra for two years, he hired the Berlin Philharmonic and made his professional conducting debut in 1908. That concert included Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, with Rachmaninoff playing the piano. The next year, he and his wife returned to Russia. There, he started his own orchestra in Moscow and began a publishing business called Éditions Russes de Musique. He acquired the works of many famous composers, including Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, and Nikolai Medtner. Between 1909 and 1920, he performed as a soloist in Europe and toured Russia by riverboat along the Volga River in 1910, 1912, and 1914. His performances featured many new musical works. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, he became the conductor of the newly named State Philharmonic Orchestra of Petrograd from 1917 to 1920. In 1920, he left Russia for Berlin and Paris. In Paris, he organized the Concerts Koussevitzky from 1921 to 1929, presenting new works by Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Maurice Ravel. In 1924, he moved to the United States and became the conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, replacing Pierre Monteux. He continued to return to Paris each summer to conduct his Concerts Koussevitzky until 1929. In 1941, he and his wife became United States citizens.

Koussevitzky’s work as conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) began a successful period for the orchestra that lasted until 1949. During those 25 years, he helped the BSO become one of the leading American orchestras. With Gertrude Robinson Smith, he helped develop the orchestra’s summer concerts and educational programs at Tanglewood. Today, the main performance venue at Tanglewood is named after him. In the early 1940s, he discovered a young tenor named Alfred Cocozza, who later became known as Mario Lanza, and gave him a scholarship to attend Tanglewood. With the Boston Symphony, he made many recordings that were praised by critics. His students and protégés included Leonard Bernstein, Eleazar de Carvalho, Samuel Adler, and Sarah Caldwell. Bernstein once received a pair of cufflinks from Koussevitzky as a gift and wore them at every concert he conducted.

Koussevitzky’s first wife was Nadezhda Galat, a dancer with the Bolshoi Ballet. They married at an unknown date, likely before 1903, and divorced in 1905. He married Natalie Ushkova on September 8, 1905. Natalie died in 1942, and Koussevitzky created the Koussevitzky Music Foundations in her honor. In late 1947, he married Olga Naumova, Natalie’s niece. Olga had lived with the couple and worked as their secretary for 18 years. She was the daughter of Aleksandr Naumov, a Russian politician who served as Minister of Agriculture. Olga was described as quiet and soft-spoken. Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland were close friends with her.

Koussevitzky’s nephew, Faviy Adolfovich Koussevitzky, known professionally as Fabien Sevitzky, was the music director of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1937 to 1955. He changed his surname to avoid accusations of favoring family members. Koussevitzky died in Boston in 1951 and was buried next to his wife, Natalie, at the Church on the Hill Cemetery in Lenox. His pet was buried at the Pine Ridge Pet Cemetery in Dedham.

Champion of contemporary music

Koussevitzky was a strong supporter of modern music and asked many famous composers to create new works. In the early 1920s, while in Paris, he included many contemporary pieces in his concerts, making sure the performances were well-prepared and of high quality. Some of the successful first performances during this time included Arthur Honegger's Pacific 231, George Gershwin's Second Rhapsody, and Albert Roussel's Suite in F.

For the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th anniversary, Koussevitzky asked Aaron Copland to write Ode, Sergei Prokofiev to compose Symphony No. 4 (which Prokofiev later revised), Paul Hindemith to create Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Igor Stravinsky to write Symphony of Psalms. He also commissioned works from Albert Roussel and Howard Hanson. In 1922, Koussevitzky asked Maurice Ravel to arrange Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition for orchestra. This version premiered on October 19, 1922, and became the most well-known orchestration of the piece. Koussevitzky controlled the rights to this arrangement for many years.

In 1940, Koussevitzky asked Randall Thompson, who was a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the men's Glee Club, to compose a new piece for a festival at Tanglewood. Koussevitzky wanted a large-scale work, but because World War II was happening and France had been taken over by Germany, Thompson could not find inspiration for such a piece. Instead, he wrote an unaccompanied choral work called Alleluia, in which the word "Alleluia" was sung 64 times in the Russian style. This piece became Thompson's most frequently performed work.

Legacy

In 1915, composer Claude Debussy dedicated the first movement of his piece En blanc et noir for two pianos to Serge Koussevitzky.

Koussevitzky was a strong supporter of new music. In 1942, he founded the Koussevitzky Music Foundations. The goal of the foundations was to help composers by asking them to create new works and paying for the performances of these works. Some compositions supported by the foundations include Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes, Douglas Moore’s opera The Ballad of Baby Doe, Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, Aaron Copland’s Symphony No. 3, Henri Dutilleux’s string quartet Ainsi la nuit, and Olivier Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie.

After Koussevitzky died in 1951, his wife, Olga Koussevitzky, gave his double bass to musician Gary Karr. The instrument was once thought to have been made in 1611 by brothers Antonio and Girolamo Amati. The bass now carries the names of both Karr and Koussevitzky. It has been played by bassist Scott Pingel and the San Francisco Academy Orchestra.

In 1956, American composer Howard Hanson, a friend of Koussevitzky, wrote his Elegy for Serge Koussevitzky.

The Tanglewood Music Center gives the Koussevitzky Prize to outstanding student conductors. The prize has been awarded since 1954, but it is not given every year. Past winners include Seiji Ozawa (1960), Russell Peck (1966), and Michael Tilson Thomas (1969).

The Musicians Club of New York, where Olga Koussevitzky was president from 1962 to 1975, presents the Serge and Olga Koussevitzky Young Artist Awards. Three prizes are given each year in categories that change between voice, strings, piano, and woodwind/brass. Past winners include Judith Raskin (1956), Jean Kraft (1959), Robert DeGaetano (1969), Paul Neubauer (1982), and François Salque (1994).

Recordings

Serge Koussevitzky recorded music with the Boston Symphony Orchestra only for Victor/RCA Victor, except for one live recording made for Columbia Records. This recording was of Symphony No. 1933, composed by Roy Harris, performed in Carnegie Hall, New York, during a concert using portable equipment. An important early RCA Victor session in Boston’s Symphony Hall in 1929 included the first recording of Ravel’s Boléro. Earlier recordings of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony and a suite from Stravinsky’s Petrushka were made in Symphony Hall in 1927.

Some of Koussevitzky’s later recordings, such as the second suite from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston), Beethoven’s First Symphony (1947, Carnegie Hall, New York, with Mendelssohn’s Italian Symphony also recorded), and Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1945, Symphony Hall, Boston), were made using RCA’s sound film optical recording process. This method was first used by the San Francisco Symphony in March 1942.

Koussevitzky’s final recordings, made in November 1950, used magnetic tape on RCA’s RT-21 two-track, 1⁄4-inch machines operating at 30 inches per second. These recordings included Sibelius’s Second Symphony and Grieg’s The Last Spring. Both recordings were later re-released on CD by RCA in Taiwan. Films of some performances at Tanglewood, including Beethoven’s Egmont Overture, were made during the 1940s.

Several 78 rpm recordings by Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra were reissued on LP by the RCA Camden label in the early 1950s as the “Centennial Symphony Orchestra.” These were sold for US$1.98 for a 12-inch LP album, compared to US$5.98 for more expensive Red Seal records. One later album included Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf and Richard Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks. The orchestra was listed as the Centennial Symphony, and the conductor was not named, but the narrator, actor Richard Hale, was identified. Koussevitzky re-recorded Peter and the Wolf in 1950 at Tanglewood with Eleanor Roosevelt as narrator, using magnetic tape. This recording was originally released on a ten-inch LP and three 45 rpm records but has never been officially reissued by RCA despite the popularity of the Camden version with Hale. Hale also narrated Arthur Fiedler’s 1953 RCA Victor recording of Peter and the Wolf with the Boston Pops Orchestra. RCA Victor reissued other historic orchestral recordings on the Camden label, using false names to avoid competition with newer recordings by the same artists on the Red Seal label.

Notable premieres

• Alexander Scriabin, Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, performed in Moscow on March 2, 1911
• Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, performed in Paris on October 19, 1922
• Arthur Honegger, Pacific 231, composed in 1923
• Sergei Prokofiev, First Violin Concerto with Marcel Darrieux as the soloist, performed in Paris on October 18, 1923
• Sergei Prokofiev, Second Symphony, performed in Paris on June 6, 1925
• Arnold Bax, Symphony No. 2, performed in Boston on December 13, 1929
• Sergei Prokofiev, Fourth Symphony, performed in Boston on November 14, 1930
• George Gershwin, Second Rhapsody, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in Boston on January 29, 1932
• Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 1, performed in Boston on November 13, 1942
• David Diamond, Symphony No. 2, performed in Boston on October 14, 1944
• Béla Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Symphony Hall in Boston on December 1, 1944
• Bohuslav Martinů, Symphony No. 3, performed in Boston on October 12, 1945
• Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring (suite), performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1945
• Samuel Barber, Knoxville: Summer of 1915, with Eleanor Steber as the soloist, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1948
• Leonard Bernstein, The Age of Anxiety, with Leonard Bernstein as the soloist, performed at Tanglewood in 1949

• Maurice Ravel’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in October 1930
• Jean Sibelius, Seventh Symphony, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra for His Master’s Voice in London in 1933
• Richard Strauss, Also sprach Zarathustra, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1935
• Roy Harris, Third Symphony, performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1939
• Hector Berlioz, Harold in Italy with William Primrose as the soloist, performed in 1946
• Aaron Copland, Appalachian Spring (suite), performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1946