Igor Markevitch’s father Boris was a pianist who had studied with Pugno and d’Albert. Two years after Igor’s birth the family left Russia, settling first in Paris and then, two years later, in Switzerland. Igor studied piano with his father until his death in 1923, and then continued with one of his father’s pupils, Paul Loyonnet. When he was thirteen he played his composition Noces to Alfred Cortot, who arranged to take him as a piano student at the Ecole Normale de Musique in Paris from 1926 to 1928, where he was also a pupil of Nadia Boulanger for harmony, counterpoint and composition. Graduating from the Ecole Normale in 1929, he was introduced to Sergei Diaghilev, who after hearing him play part of his Sinfonietta commissioned him to compose a piano concerto and ballet for his company. Markevitch took the solo part in the first performance of his piano concerto, which was given at the opening of Diaghilev’s 1929 season at the Royal Opera House in London, with Roger Desormiere conducting. Diaghilev’s death in the same year threw further plans into disarray: the proposed ballet commission was abandoned but parts of it were integrated into Markevitch’s Cantate, which was successfully performed for the first time in Paris during 1930.
Markevitch was taken up by leading figures in the French intellectual world, such as the writer Jean Cocteau and the composer Darius Milhaud as well as the conductor Desormiere. The premiere of L’Envol d’Icare in Paris in 1933 under Desormiere established Markevitch’s European reputation, and in his book on modern music, Music Ho! published in 1936, Constant Lambert described him as ‘the leading figure of the Franco-Russian school’. Having started to take an interest in conducting during the early 1930s, Markevitch made his debut as a conductor in 1933, in the Dutch premiere of his composition Rebus, and began to study intermittently with Hermann Scherchen from 1934 onwards in Switzerland, where he settled in 1935. He replaced Scherchen as the conductor of the premiere of his oratorio Le Paradis perdu at the Queen’s Hall, London, in December 1935. He continued to compose during the rest of the 1930s, and recorded two of his major orchestral scores, L’Envol d’Icare and Le Nouvel Age for HMV with the Belgian National Orchestra.
In 1940 Markevitch visited Florence and settled in Italy, having failed to comply with Swiss domiciliary laws. Following the hard winter of 1941–1942 he became seriously ill, an experience which he later described as ‘dead between two lives’. After his recovery he ceased to compose at all: his last composition dates from 1941. He joined the Italian partisans in 1943, becoming a member of the Committee of Liberation of the Italian Resistance; and following the invasion of Italy by Allied forces, the British asked Markevitch to reorganise the orchestra in Florence and the Florence Maggio Musicale in 1944. This marked the beginning of his second career, as a conductor, which was quite distinct from his first as a composer.
By 1947, the year in which he took Italian citizenship, Markevitch was well on the way to becoming established as an international conductor of note. In addition to guest-conducting extensively, he was appointed to numerous permanent positions. These included the chief conductorships of the Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (1952–1955), the Montreal Symphony Orchestra (1956–1960), the Havana Philharmonic Orchestra (1957–1958), the Lamoureux Orchestra, Paris (1957–1961), the Spanish Radio and Television Symphony Orchestra (1965–1969), the Monte Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra (1967–1972), and the Orchestra of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome (1973–1975). He conducted at the Royal Opera House, London during the 1954–1955 season at Covent Garden, first appeared in the USA in 1955 with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and in Japan in 1968 with the Japan Philharmonic Orchestra.
From the beginning of the 1970s Markevitch started to lose his hearing, which necessarily limited his activities as a conductor. In January 1978, some five years before his death, he at last returned to his own music, conducting a concert in Brussels which included Icare (the revised version, from 1943, of L’Envol d’Icare) and Le Paradis perdu. Having previously forsworn his music since the close of World War II he began to conduct it again with greater frequency, but the subsequent resurgence of interest really only got fully under way after his death in 1983, the year in which he also returned to Kiev, the city of his birth. In addition to his work on the podium, Markevitch was an active and influential teacher of conducting: he taught at the Salzburg Mozarteum (1948–1956), in Mexico City (1957–1958), Moscow (1963), Madrid (1965–1969), and from 1969 onwards at Monte Carlo.
Markevitch gained a reputation as a technically highly assured conductor who insisted upon an exact reading of the scores which he conducted, yet who was also capable of realising performances of considerable intensity. These qualities made him an excellent recording conductor, and his discography was very large indeed. Among the labels for which he recorded were EMI, Philips, Deutsche Grammophon and the Concert Hall Record Club. Few of these recordings are without interest. Regrettably, apart from the early 78rpm recordings mentioned earlier, Markevitch made no recordings of his own compositions. His own words provided a poignant commentary on this situation: ‘We musicians play in Time and with Time, but sometimes it is Time that plays with us. One day, unpredictably, the evolution of culture makes real an oeuvre which has lain in obscurity.’
© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Patmore (A–Z of Conductors, Naxos 8.558087–90).