Alexander Goldenweiser was a close friend of Tolstoyand Scriabin. He was a pupil of Alexander Siloti, Vassily Safonoff and Paul Pabst, and studied composition with Arensky, Taneyev and Ippolitov-Ivanov, all three former students of Tchaikovsky. At the Moscow Conservatory, he was the teacher of many of the most signi- ficant pianists mother Russia was to produce. The list of these students reads like a veritable who's who of the great Russian pianists of the 20th century: Lazar Berman, Grigory Ginzburg, Samuel Feinberg, Tatiana Nikolayeva, Nikolai Kapustin, Dimitri Bashkirov, Dmitry Kabalevsky, Galina Eguiazarova, Alexander Braginsky, Sulamita Aronovsky, Dmitry Paperno, Oxana Yablonskaya, Nelly Akopian-Tamarina, Dmitry Blagoy, and others. Alexander Goldeweiser worked closely with Scriabin. He was the accompanist for Scriabin's piano concerto, and participated in the founding of the Young Scriabinians in 1909. During Scriabin's lifetime, Goldenweiser was one of the composer's most important champions. His performance of the Rachmaninoff Melody is a revelation. He made a number of renowned recordings as a pianist, inclu- ding four recordings on piano roll for the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano in 1910. Awards: People's Artist of the RSFSR (1931); Stalin Prize, first class (1947); Two Orders of Lenin; Order of the Red Banner of Labour, three times (1937, 1950, 1955); People's Artist of the USSR (1946).