Oscar Feltsman

Oscar Borisovich Feltsman (Ukrainian & ; 18 February 1921 – 3 February 2013) was a Ukrainian-born composer. Biography Feltsman was born in Odesa, the son of Boris Osipovich Feltsman, a Jewish orthopedic surgeon who also played the piano professionally. He had musical training from the age of five; learning the violin as a pupil of Pyotr Stolyarsky and the piano with Bertha Reynbald, who also taught Emil Gilels and Tatiana Goldfarb. He produced his first musical composition for the piano “Autumn” when he was six years old. Feltsman graduated from the Pyotr Stolyarsky Music School in Odesa in 1939, where he studied composition with the composer Nikolai Vilinsky. Then Feltsman was admitted to the Moscow Conservatory, studying under Vissarion Shebalin who wrote a letter of thanks on behalf of the Moscow Conservatory to Vilinsky for teaching Feltsman composition. During the Second World War, Feltsman was evacuated to Novosibirsk, becoming at 20 the executive secretary of the Siberian Union of Composers, where he wrote music for the philharmonic, Leningrad Alexandrinsky Theater and the Jewish theater of Belarus. In the same period Feltsman wrote an operetta based on Valentin Kataev’s pla