Pazovskii, Arii

Born Jan. 21 (Feb. 2), 1887, in Perm’; died Jan. 6, 1953, in Moscow. Soviet conductor. People’s Artist of the USSR (1940). Member of the CPSU from 1941.

Pazovskii graduated in 1904 from L. Auer’s violin class at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he also studied with N. A. Krasnokutskii. He made his debut as a conductor in 1905 at the Perm’ Opera Theater, later conducting in opera houses in Kazan, Saratov, “Kharkov, Odessa, and Kiev; in the Zimin Opera Theater in Moscow; and in the Petrograd National House. From 1936 to 1943 he was artistic director of the Kirov Theater of Opera and Ballet in Leningrad, where he helped produce such operas as Chishko’s The Battleship Potemkin (1937), Glinka’s Ivan Susanin (1939), Tchaikovsky’s The Sorceress (1941), and Emel’ian Pugachev (1942) by Koval’.

From 1923 to 1928, with an interruption, Pazovskii was conductor at the Bolshoi Theater; from 1943 to 1948 he was the theater’s artistic director. He helped stage such operas as Gounod’s Faust (1924), Wagner’s Die Walkiire (1925), Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov (1927), and Glinka’s Ivan Susanin (1945). Pazovskii was awarded the State Prize of the USSR in 1941, 1942, and 1943, as well as two orders and several medals.