Pavel KOGAN, conductor

In 1970, when Pavel Kogan was 18, his talent as a violinist received the highest grades at the Sibelius International Violin Competition. This success was followed by numerous concerts with the leading orchestras of Russia, Europe, Japan and the United States, including the Philadelphia Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra.

One would think that Pavel Kogan’s rapid rise as a virtuoso violinist should have prompted him to perfect this particular mastery of his. But the great maestro has been convinced that conducting is a synthesis, or a quintessence of all musical arts. The brilliant career of a violinist became an excellent basis for his work as a conductor. Like no other, he understood that the strings were the foundation of a symphony orchestra and the core of its sound.

Although Pavel Kogan first rose to the conductor’s stand when he was not yet 19, his debut as a symphony conductor took place in 1974 with the Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) Philharmonic Orchestra, a leading orchestra of the Russian Federation. In the years that followed, the conductor Pavel Kogan performed with the best orchestras of Europe, America and Japan. Among those, the Russian orchestras make up a so-called Hall of Fame of Russian culture – the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR Radio and Television, the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Bolshoi Theater Symphony Orchestra. The maestro became a welcome guest at symphony music festivals in Helsinki, Dubrovnik, Montreux, Prague and Villach.

Tours by conductors are always big events in the music world. They always bring together different schools, traditions and, ultimately, cultures. However, for a person aiming for the summits of conducting mastery a tour with a “strange” orchestra is only a short holiday where your biggest goal is to show yourself and to make a notation in the world charts. What else could the conductor dream of when the great Mravinsky invited him to conduct the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra during their tour of Spain? What was lacking for the maestro who opened the legendary production of La Traviata at the Bolshoi Opera in 1988? Strange as it might seem, he was missing the responsibility and involvement in the life of a real creative group and the strategic implementation of his ideas. This could only be achieved with an orchestra of his own.

In 1988 Pavel Kogan got an invitation from the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra. He became the Music Director and Chief Conductor of that orchestra. During the time he worked with the orchestra and performed all over the world, he was also giving concerts in his country as well: Moscow, Leningrad, Sverdlovsk, Kiev, the Baltic capital cities… It seemed that the maestro was trying to hold together the country falling apart. But even a top notch artist cannot do everything.

In May 1989 Pavel Kogan became the head of the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra. The fact that this was in his own country was very important to Kogan. He took over the orchestra, and the orchestra took him in: the unanimous choice of the team was supported by the official appointment.

Pavel Kogan’s ability to work hard, to achieve his goals, his talent as a musician and his perfect knowledge of the nature of string instruments allows him to constantly improve the creative and repertoire policy of the orchestra. A major step forward for MSSO was the decision to include works by Western classics in its programs, which, in Pavel Kogan’s opinion, foster discipline and determination in a creative team. A hallmark of Kogan’s orchestra, as MSSO is referred to all over the world, is its large-scale series, or cycles: all symphony works of Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert, Bruckner, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich; all Mahler symphonies and vocal cycles. For Pavel Kogan a pause in the acquisition of new repertoire is a big sin, while the acquisition itself is not only the accumulation of new material but also its creative interpretation and renewal of his own visions and renditions. In 1977 Pavel Kogan received the National Prize of the Russian Federation for the performance of the full cycle of all Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies and the Vocal Cycles. That same year he became a full member of the Russian Academy of Arts.

Pavel Kogan’s long friendship with many outstanding performers, both on a personal and artistic level, helped the orchestra to expand the list of soloists who have performed with the orchestra. Among them are Yu. Bashmet, V. Tretyakov, Y. Shtarker, V. Repin, M. Vengerov and many other excellent musicians. MSSO has been conducted by K. Kondrashin, G. Rozhdestvensky, E. Svetlanov, V. Gergiev and M. Yansons.