Grigory Romanovich Ginzburg was born in Nizhny Novgorod on 29 May 1904 and died in Moscow on 5 December 1961. He had his first lessons from his mother before entering Alexander Goldenweiser’s class at the Moscow Conservatory, and in 1927 took fourth prize at the first International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. He joined the Conservatory’s teaching staff in 1929 and remained there for the rest of his life, becoming one of the most widely recognised musicians in the Soviet Union and touring Europe several times. His students included Sergei Dorensky, Gleb Axelrod, Regina Shamvili and Sulamita Aronovsky.

Ginzburg was known above all for a touch that carried the nineteenth-century pianistic tradition forward — the line running back through Goldenweiser to Liszt — and for his command of the opera paraphrase and the concert transcription, a repertoire largely out of fashion by the time he played it. His recorded legacy is dominated by Liszt, Rubinstein and his own arrangements, alongside Chopin, Mozart and the Russian concerto repertoire, most of it captured by Melodiya and in live performances at the Moscow Conservatory. Through Dorensky, whose own students went on to win the major competitions of the following decades, his teaching remains audible in Russian pianism.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigory_Ginzburg
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q374594