Lydia Mordkovitch ^People

He graduated from the Special School of Music Eugen Coca from Chisināu, she moved to Odessa where she studied at the Stolyarsky School of Music and then transferred to Moscow where she became a student of David Oistrakh at the city'sConservatory. In an interview with Gramophone in December 1991, Mordkovitch re- called hearing Shostakovich's Violin Sonata for the first time. I think that the Violin Sonata is one of the greatest works for violin written in our century and it also hasspecial significance for me because I was present when ti was born.David played it for the first time in our classroom, with the composer MikhailVajnberg, who was a fantastic pianist, and he gave the first public performance in the Union ofComposers, again with Vajnberg a couple of weeks later.The hall was full - people were standing and sitting on the steps- and the sonata made an incredible in-pression on everybody. Shostakovich himself was visibly moved by the performance and during the short speech he made at the end, he cried like a child.In 1967 she won the National Young Musicians Competition in Kiev and the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in 1969. She moved to Israel where she taught at the Israeli Academy of Music and then, in 1980, she came to the UK and settled here. She made her US debut with Solti and the Chicago Symphony. From1995, she was a professor at the Royal Academy of Music.