Saint Petersburg Conservatory

Theatre Square and the conservatory in 1913.

The St Petersburg Conservatory (Санкт-Петербургская консерватория in Russian; Sankt-Peterburgskaya konservatoriya in transliteration) is a music school in Saint Petersburg. Its full name is the St Petersburg State Conservatory named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov (Санкт-Петербургская государственная консерватория имени Н.А. Римского-Корсакова); former names are the Petrograd Conservatory (Петроградская консерватория) and the Leningrad Conservatory (Ленинградская консерватория).

The conservatory was founded in 1862 by the Russian pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. The current building was erected in the 1890s on the site of the old Bolshoi Theatre of Saint Petersburg and still preserves a grand staircase and landing from that historic theatre. As a centre of a Russian school of composition (along with the Moscow Conservatory, founded a little later), its graduates have included such giants as Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, and George Balanchine. Its most famous career-professor was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, who joined the faculty in 1871 and whose name the conservatory has born since 1944. In 2004, the conservatory had around 275 members of staff and 1,400 students.

See also

*Moscow Conservatory

Links

*Official site (in Russian and English)