Serge Koussevitzky

Conductor Serge Koussevitsky was born in Vyshni Volochek, Russia, on July 26, 1874. As a child he studied music in Moscow, mainly the double bass, and it wasn't long before he was considered a virtuoso on the instrument; while still a teenager he gave concerts not only in Russia but in Germany and England. In addition to studying music, he also studied conducting.

He made his debut as a conductor in Berlin in 1908. The next year he organized his own orchestra in Moscow and later that year started a music publishing company, which eventually published works by Sergei Prokofiev, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Rachmaninoff and other notable composers.

In the years between 1910 and 1914 he and his orchestra toured small towns up and down the Volga River, bringing to many of the residents the type of music that they had never heard before.

After the Russian Revolution of 1917, Koussevitsky was appointed director of the State Symphony Orchestra in Petrograd (later renamed Leningrad).

He left Russia in 1920 for Paris to organize concerts; he stayed in France until 1924, when he moved to the US and settled in Boston, where he was hired to lead the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

It was Koussevitsky who commissioned French composer Maurice Ravel, in 1922, to orchestrate Modest Mussorgsky's piano work "Pictures At An Exhibition". Koussevitzky made the first recording of the Ravel orchestration of "Pictures" with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Ravel-orchestrated "Pictures at an Exhibition" became the single most famous orchestral version of a work originally composed for a solo instrument, and the fame of his version has surpassed several other orchestrations of it, including Leopold Stokowski's. After Koussevitzky's death, it was recorded by practically every famous conductor and orchestra, and has become a standard work in the repertoire of symphony orchestras all over the world.

In 1934 he began the annual Berkshire Symphonic Festival (now known as the Berkshire Festival), a series of outdoor concerts by the Boston Symphony.

Starting in 1938 the concerts were held in Tanglewood, an estate in Lenox, Massachusetts.

In 1940 he founded the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, a summer school where promising musical students would work with and be taught by prominent musicians.

With the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Koussevitzsky made the first recording of Aaron Copland's "Appalachian Spring", in 1945.

He remained its conductor and director until he retired in 1949 (he became an American citizen in 1941). Over the 25 years he was in Boston he was responsible for the premieres of the works of many major American composers, such as Aaron Copland and Walter Piston.