Samuil Feinberg was born in Odessa, the ‘cradle of Russian pianism’, but his parents moved to Moscow in 1894. Feinberg mostly played by ear and improvised until the age of ten, although during this time he had a few lessons from his sister’s piano teacher Sofia Abramova Gourevich. From the age of ten until fourteen Feinberg studied with A. F. Jensen and in 1904 went to the Philharmonia Music School (Moscow Philharmonic Society) to study with Alexander Goldenweiser. After the revolution of 1905 Goldenweiser left the school and went to the Moscow Conservatory where Feinberg joined him. By the age of twelve Feinberg was already composing and going to concerts where he heard Eugen d’Albert, Alfred Reisenauer and Josef Hofmann. He also had private lessons in composition with Nikolai Zhilyaev who was a close friend of Scriabin. He learnt very quickly; Goldenweiser would expect two preludes and fugues of Bach to be learnt and memorised within three days, and Feinberg learnt Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 8 in four days having never before heard it or seen the score. When he played Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4, the composer exclaimed that he had never heard such a convincing performance of his work. For his graduation Feinberg prepared all forty-eight preludes and fugues of Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier and César Franck’s Prélude, Choral et Fugue, as well as music by Handel, Mozart and Chopin, Scriabin’s Sonata No. 4 Op. 30 and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 30.

Between graduation and the beginning of World War I, Feinberg made two tours of Germany and in 1914 was the first Russian pianist to play Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier complete in public. At the beginning of hostilities Feinberg was sent to the Polish front but he contracted typhus and returned to Moscow for the remainder of the war. After being appointed professor at the Moscow Conservatory, Feinberg began to give more concerts outside of the USSR, in Italy, Austria and Germany, and in 1925 took part in a festival of contemporary music in Venice where he played his Piano Sonata No. 6 to great acclaim. In the autumn of 1923 he gave the Russian première of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 Op. 26 and in May 1925 performed all ten of Scriabin’s piano sonatas in two concerts in Moscow.

During the 1930s Feinberg served on the juries of piano competitions including the Ysaÿe Competition in Brussels. He had a phenomenal memory and a huge repertoire and began performing all thirty-two of Beethoven’s sonatas in public as well as most of the works of Chopin and Schumann. During the 1940–1941 season he played Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier complete and all thirty-two sonatas of Beethoven in public recitals. From the early 1950s onward, Feinberg suffered from a heart condition and gave his final concert on 3 April 1956. However, he continued to write, teach, compose and record until his death in 1962.

Among Feinberg’s compositions are three piano concertos and twelve piano sonatas. He also left many transcriptions of works by Borodin, Mussorgsky and Bach as well as three movements from Tchaikovsky’s symphonies, the third movement of the Symphony No. 6 having been recorded by Arcadi Volodos and Lazar Berman. His earlier compositions are influenced by Scriabin, but later he found a more individual style. Feinberg also wrote an extremely important book on piano playing entitled Pianism as Art (Pianizm kak iskusstvo). It was published in Moscow in 1965, but unfortunately has not been translated into English.

Feinberg was an intellectual, sophisticated and highly educated man whose interests and knowledge went far beyond music and piano playing. The level of his intelligence can be gained from an interview with a psychologist he gave in 1946 which was translated for a CD booklet on the Arbiter label. Feinberg expresses himself in a most lucid, perceptive and clear-cut way. His playing is of a similar style in that one feels everything has been completely considered and thought out. He is, without doubt, one of the greatest of Russian, if not all, pianists.

Exactly what Feinberg recorded is impossible to tell. Very little of this great artist’s recordings have been made available in the West. Most important is the complete recording of Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier recorded in 1959, one of the greatest versions ever to be recorded. Two Scriabin sonatas appeared on the Dante label: the Sonata No. 4 Op. 30, which so impressed the composer, and an incredible version of the Sonata No. 2 Op.19. This is quite extraordinary playing, where in the first movement Feinberg perfectly expresses Scriabin’s ecstasy, then in the second movement takes flight; yet he is always in complete control. Three discs appeared on the Triton label in Japan, each devoted to a single composer: there is Bach, including excellent versions of the C minor and D major Toccatas, three Beethoven sonatas, and less frequently-heard Schumann in the form of the Allegro in B minor Op. 8 and the Humoreske Op. 20. One of the best surveys of Feinberg’s recordings is a disc from Arbiter which contains recordings he made for Polydor in Berlin whilst on tour there in 1929, plus some Russian recordings made in the late 1930s. A performance of Beethoven’s ‘Appassionata’ Sonata is stunning in its command and control. Other recordings that have appeared in the West include seven of Scriabin’s Mazurkas Op. 3, some Mozart piano sonatas, and Liszt’s Mephisto-Waltz No. 1, where Feinberg’s astonishing virtuosity is always at the service of the music.

A disc from BMG’s first Russian Piano School Series has one of the most sublime tracks of Feinberg’s playing. Recorded a few weeks before his death it is of a Bach chorale-prelude arranged for piano by Feinberg. It is a distillation of Feinberg’s pianism: intimate music-making, profound and beautiful, with Feinberg drawing the listener into his sound world and sharing his love of the music of Bach.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — Jonathan Summers (A–Z of Pianists, Naxos 8.558107–10).