Iso Elinson

Russian-British pianist (1907-1964) Elinson was born in Mogilev, Russia. After studying the piano with his mother (herself a pupil of Anton Rubinstein) at the age of four Elinson enrolled at the St Petersburg Conservatory where he continued with Felix Blumenfeld (the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz) and took composition classes under Alexander Glazunov. In 1927 at the age of only twenty, Elinson performed all thirty-two of Beethoven’s piano sonatas in Leningrad, Moscow and Kazan to celebrate the centenary of the composer’s death, and in 1929 played the complete Wohltemperierte Klavier in Berlin. While in Germany be became friends with Albert Einstein, who provided him with a testimonial in 1930 that referred to ‘his God-given artistic gifts and his pure child-like face’. He took British citizenship in the mid-1930s and performed in the UK and US regularly. Iso Elinson died at the age of fifty-six during the interval of a charity concert at King’s College, London.