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Gregor Piatigorsky (April 17, 1903 – August 6, 1976) was a Russian cellist.
He was born in Ekaterinoslav and studied violin and piano with his father as a child. After seeing and hearing the cello, he determined to become a cellist and constructed a play cello with two sticks. He was given a real cello when he was seven.
He won a scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, earning money for his family by playing in local cafés.
The Russian Revolution took place when he was 13. Shortly thereafter he started playing in the Lenin Quartet. At 15, he was hired as the principal cellist for the Bolshoi Theater.
The Russian authorities would not allow him to travel abroad to further his studies, so he smuggled himself and his cello into Poland on a cattle train with a group of artists. One of the women was a rather large soprano who, when the border guards started shooting at them, grabbed Piatigorsky and his cello. The cello did not survive intact, but it was the only casualty.
Now 18, he studied briefly in Berlin and Leipzig, playing in a trio in a Russian café to put food on the table. Among the patrons of the café was Wilhelm Furtwängler, who heard him and hired him as the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic.
In 1929, he first visited the United States, playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic under Willem Mengelberg. He loved the United States and became a citizen in 1942.
He recorded extensively in a trio with Artur Rubinstein and William Primrose and enjoyed playing chamber music privately with Vladimir Horowitz and Nathan Milstein.
From 1941 to 1949, he was head of the cello department at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and he also taught at Tanglewood, Boston University, and the University of Southern California, where he remained until his death in Los Angeles, California.
He owned two Stradivarius cellos.
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