The Russian School of the Violin
ABCs of the violinist in an hour
Since the first fiddlers, violinists and strolling players of the tenth through the fourteenth centuries, the Russian School of the Violin traversed an immense way in order to find, at last, one of its founding fathers, the composer and interpreter Ivan Khandochkine (1747-1804). Developed constantly afterward by his brilliant successors of the nineteenth century, such as Nikolaï Afanasieff and Henryk Wieniawski, this School perpetuated itself until such emblematic faces at the beginning of the twentieth century as Piotr Stoliarski and Léopold Auer. The school of Stoliarski presented masterful interpreters such as David Oïstrakh and Nathan Milstein; the one of Auer was able to form Heifetz, Elman, Milstein and Zimbalist... The class of Mostras, which then all taught at the conservatory of Moscow in the early twentieth century, extended itself by another branch of the Russian School that fully blossomed in the United States with the school of Ivan Galamian. This tradition was perpetuated by Yuri Yankelevitch and Leonid Kogan, themselves both students of Abram Yampolsky, and generated an equally great group of violinists. Thus new generations of artists appearing today extend this tradition and translate its principles in their lives, perpetuating to the world the wonderful musical inheritance of the Russian School of the violin.
