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Ilya Musin, Russian Conductor and Mentor, Dies at 95
Ilya Musin, the Russian conductor who taught a generation of maestros while remaining relatively unknown outside his own country, died on June 6 in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was 95.
During his six-decade tenure at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory, formerly the Leningrad Conservatory of Music, Mr. Musin was considered the country's foremost teacher of conducting, instilling in his students expressiveness and exactitude. Denied a considerable conducting career by Soviet anti-Semitism, he turned to teaching, nurturing maestros like Valery Gergiev, Yuri Temirkanov, Rudolf Barshai, Yakov Kreizberg and Semyon Bychkov.
Though his reputation in the Soviet Union was legendary, Mr. Musin did not travel abroad until 1991. His first foreign public concert was in London in 1996, when he conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, to critical acclaim, in a program of Mozart, Rimsky-Korsakov and Prokofiev.
Ilya Aleksandrovich Musin was born in the provincial town of Kostroma on the Volga River. His mother died when he was 6; his father, a watchmaker and music lover, encouraged him to put aside his painting aspirations and become a pianist.
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Mr. Musin moved to St. Petersburg in 1919, shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution, and enrolled at the Petrograd Conservatory. There he attended symphonies and operas for the first time -- more than 80 in his first year alone, often accompanied by his classmate Dmitri Shostakovich. Practicing throughout one brutally cold winter in an unheated room, he wrapped himself in boots, sweaters, scarf and coat, leaving only his hands exposed and causing so much permanent damage to them that he was forced to abandon any hopes of a career as a pianist.
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Then in 1926, Nikolai Malko, the principal conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, opened a conducting faculty at the conservatory. After an unsuccessful audition, Mr. Musin pleaded for acceptance and was admitted. He embarked on a painstaking study of the art of gesture and its influence on orchestral sound, a process that remained the basis of the Leningrad School of conducting for the next 60 years. His method was presented in a book, ''The Technique of Conducting.''
In class Mr. Musin was less regimented, illustrating the movements he desired by picking up chairs or miming such gestures as eating soup. Much of his approach derived from natural motions and body language, which he supplemented with more formal theories gleaned from the writings of the acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavsky.
Under Stalin, Mr. Musin never had charge of a leading Russian orchestra, a sacrifice he willingly made, he said in 1996, because of his refusal to join the Creative Union of Musicians and Composers, and also because he was Jewish. As Malko's star pupil, he logically would have succeeded his teacher as conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic.
Instead, he became Malko's assistant jointly with Yevgeny Mravinsky, a member of the Communist Party. After conducting 30 concerts in 1937, Mr. Musin was abruptly sent to the Minsk Philharmonic, well away from the center of Soviet cultural life. In his absence, Mravinsky was appointed to the Leningrad post. Mr. Musin was never asked back.
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He returned to the conservatory after World War II, his dreams of a conducting career dashed as he watched his former students and less talented rivals elevated in stature above him. ''I decided that I would have to live without the Great Hall of the Philharmonic and concentrate on my teaching,'' he wrote in his memoir, ''Lessons of Life.''
His devoted and reverent students frequently invited him to appear as a guest conductor across the Soviet Union. When he made his Western debut, he was 92, conducting the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert arranged by his former pupil Sian Edwards.
Though he had suffered four heart attacks since the early 1990's, Mr. Musin maintained a rigorous schedule, teaching regular classes at the conservatory (including one shortly before his death), conducting orchestral sessions and giving master classes in Europe, Japan and Israel, which he usually ended with a concert.
Mr. Musin married Anna Aronovna in 1931. She died before he did, as did a son. He is survived by another son, Edward, in Moscow.
The art of conducting, Mr. Musin said, lay in ''making music visible with your hands.'' A conductor ''must have expressiveness and exactness,'' he continued. ''These are incompatible. The conductor's challenge, therefore, is to find a way of combining them.''
