A Child of Ekaterinoslav

Leonid Kogan was born on 14 November 1924 in Ekaterinoslav, now Dnipro, Ukraine, into a Jewish family. His father, a photographer, played a little violin; from then on the instrument never left the boy’s side, and at night he would lay it by his bed. First taught by Philip Yampolsky, a pupil of the legendary Leopold Auer, he entered Moscow’s Central School of Music at the age of nine in the class of Abram Yampolsky, who took him into his home, found him a violin and remained his teacher for eighteen years, right through the Conservatory.

“Send them and take first place”

In 1941, Kogan made his debut with Brahms’s Concerto, then toured a war-torn Soviet Union from Leningrad to Ulaanbaatar. In 1949, he became the first violinist to perform all twenty-four of Paganini’s Caprices in a single evening. Two years later, Queen Elisabeth of Belgium persuaded Stalin to let Soviet violinists enter the competition that now bears her name; the Kremlin’s order was short: “Send them and take first place.” Consulted, David Oistrakh named Kogan. Rushed back from a tour on the Volga, he triumphed in Brussels in 1951 with Paganini’s First Concerto, and went on to conquer the stages of the world.

The Mask and the Flame

Purity of tone, refined bowing, a sovereign legato and a vibrato of the utmost elegance: Kogan’s playing brings to mind only one other violinist, Jascha Heifetz, whom he had heard as a child during Heifetz’s only Soviet tour in 1934 — “For me, he was the ideal artist.” Behind the iron mask he seemed to wear on stage burned an intense flame. A teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, he pursued an international career until his untimely death in 1982, remembered as one of the greatest violinists of the twentieth century.

“Dear Kogan, your violin and your music are so often present in my paintings…”
— Marc Chagall