Sulamita Aronovsky
Pianist Sulamita Aronovsky studied at the Moscow Conservatoire during its 1950s golden era. Now aged 92, she shares her memories of that time with Michael Church
The 92-year-old concert pianist shares her memories of studying in 1950s Moscow with Michael Church
One day last year, Sulamita Aronovsky’s phone rang with an unexpected message. A box of 1958 recordings bearing her name had been found in the Vilnius radio archives, accompanied by an instruction that they should be destroyed. That, she had thought, had been her punishment for defecting from the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War. ‘And when I listened to those tapes,’ she says, ‘I thought they weren’t so bad.’ That’s typically modest: on the CD now released under the title Amity, her Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and Ciurlionis – as a good patriot, she includes a piece from Lithuania’s leading painter-composer – are of a very high standard.
She now looks back on a life bisected by a disabling car crash which ended her career as a concert pianist, but which did not prevent her embarking on a successful new career as a teacher. What seems to have carried her through is her salty wit, her indomitable will and her treasury of Lithuanian and Russian memories.
The most indelible of those memories are of the Moscow Conservatoire where she began studying in 1953, the year Stalin died. ‘When he died, I cried, as did almost everybody else at the Conservatoire,’ she recalls. ‘The news came over on loudspeakers everywhere, accompanied by tragic music by Tchaikovsky. Nobody was overly bothered by the fact that on the same day Prokofiev had also died. Stalin was the father of the nation, but Prokofiev was just a musician.’
Those were the days when ‘formalism’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ were ruthlessly expunged,
‘‘David Oistrakh was a good musician, but was working more for the government than for the Conservatoire
and when all political discussion was dangerous. ‘It was better not to have any,’ she says. ‘If we were careless in what we said, we were penalised – which is what happened to me later.’
One of 200 students at the Conservatoire, Sulamita slept in a dormitory of which her most vivid memory seems rather strange: ‘When we went to bed and the lights were switched off, you could hear a noise – the sound of munching. Food was not provided at the Conservatoire, and we were hungry – we didn’t want to share our food.’
But this was a place where musical titans walked the earth; Aronovsky and her friends may have been confined to the gallery, but they had a privileged view. Sviatoslav Richter was one of their gods, but very furtive, working obsessively through the night to ‘clean’ his interpretations: ‘He knew he was being watched by the authorities because he was of German origin, and also because he was… unconventional.’ Homosexual? ‘Yes, and that was not encouraged. He had the protective companionship of a lady singer – Nina Dorliak –
who married him. Socially he wasn’t easy going – you had to approach him carefully.’
Was he not Shostakovich’s favourite pianist? ‘Not sure about that, because Shostakovich wasn’t straightforward either; he had a very awkward manner. His best friend seemed to be my classmate Tatiana Nikolaeva, whose repertoire was nothing but Bach and Shostakovich. She was a product of the Soviet system – careful who she spoke to – and she remained so after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’
Sulamita speaks with awe of Maria Yudina. As a Jew who converted to Orthodox Christianity, and as a friend of Boulez, Stockhausen and Boris Pasternak, Yudina was a thorn in the officials’ side but was repeatedly spared, says Aronovsky, thanks to the belief that she was a confidante of Stalin. ‘She was a huge woman who wore a big pectoral cross, and who made the sign of the cross over an audience before playing. When she played, you felt she was in charge of all Russia.’
How does Aronovsky remember violinist David Oistrakh? Her voice darkens: ‘I was careful not to have much to do with him. He was a real Soviet man who toed the party line, and I and my colleagues did not trust him. He was a good musician, but he was working more for the government than for the Conservatoire.’
Other professors win high praise. ‘Mstislav Rostropovich was very charming and funny. What impressed me was his piano playing when he accompanied his students.’ And it’s nice to learn that the glowing pianism of Emil Gilels was complemented by the glow of his offstage personality: ‘He was a very decent, considerate and highly cultured man.’ Other performers would hit the bottle after giving a recital, ‘but he didn’t need the extra stimulus of alcohol – he would just be sociable afterwards, in a nice way’.
Aronovsky reserves her highest praise for the legendary Alexander Goldenweiser, a friend of Tolstoy and dedicatee of works by Rachmaninov and Medtner. He first won her loyalty by extracting her from the clutches of a professor whose interest in her had more to do with her looks than her pianism, and Goldenweiser proceeded to shape her playing profoundly. ‘He always got to the point. He had all the Beethoven sonatas under his fingers, and in his own edition which he carried about with him.’
But this was a melting pot of talent at every level, and Aronovsky’s fellow-students glittered too. Her best friend was Vladimir Ashkenazy, despite their unpromising start in a competition. ‘He was to play first, then I would play after him. When I first saw this little man, six years younger than me, I assumed that he wouldn’t be much of a threat. But when he played I knew he would become a great pianist.’ He won the prize. Did she forgive him? She laughs: ‘Of course, and we became lifelong friends.’
The friendship endured. ‘When I was trying to start a career in London after my accident, I had no qualification documents, so he wrote a letter of commendation which opened doors. A few years later he said he needed help. His son Vovka had suddenly decided he wanted to become a pianist, and would I please teach him?’ She did for six years, with the result that Vovka has made a fine career, both as a performer and a professor.
Sulamita Aronovsky had the luck to live through a golden age of pianism, and she honoured that by setting up the quadrennial London International Piano Competition which has notched up as distinguished a list of winners as the Leeds competition has done. Meanwhile, teaching at the Royal Academy of Music – which at 92 she still does – has been another way of honouring that memory.