A hunchbacked figure with a pronounced Russian accent, a silver-topped cane and a flamboyantly Oriental head-dress: everybody in London’s pianistic firmament knew Sulamita Aronovsky by sight, and many knew her personally. Her death at the age of 93 in December last year removed one of the last survivors of Soviet Russia’s pianistic golden age, who was also a monstre sacré – loved and feared in equal measure – in the overheated world of piano competitions. Everyone knew her story: she had left her native Lithuania for Britain in 1971, and had a car crash whose calamitous injuries ended her burgeoning career as a pianist; she became instead a noted teacher, and founded and ran the London International Piano Competition. Yet the intimate details of her story have great poignancy, reflecting her vain attempts to heal a lifelong emotional wound through symbolic acts of altruism.

Born to Jewish parents in 1929 in the Lithuanian city of Kaunas – her father was a doctor and her mother a dentist – Sulamita Ziuraitiene was a headstrong child whose talent was spotted by scouts for the junior branch of the St Petersburg Conservatory, which was forced by war to evacuate to Tashkent. There she was taught by Lev Barenboim, an offbeat but inspirational guru. The most talented young players were rewarded with a better food ration, but Sulamita traded hers for money to rent a piano on which she could practise. But the only time she was allowed to do that was by starting at 4.30 in the morning.

Loved and feared in equal measure: Sulamita Aronovsky, here with her pupil Ian Fountain, was a familiar figure in London’s pianistic circles (photo: Tully Potter)

Back in Vilnius after the war, she married a young pianist, Kastytis Ziuraitis, and they had a son, Balis. Making ends meet in the Soviet style mocked by Shostakovich in his operetta Cheryomushki, the family – plus Sulamita’s mother-in-law – lived in a tiny windowless room in the theatre where Sulamita was working as a ballet repetiteur. In 1953 she and her husband went on to study at the Moscow Conservatory, leaving Balis with his grandparents – a fateful decision that would haunt her for the rest of her life.

I once pumped Sulamita for her memories of the Conservatory, and surprises came tumbling out. As one of 200 student pianists, she slept in a dormitory where her most vivid nocturnal memory was the sound of munching under the bedclothes: ‘Food was not provided at the Conservatory, and we were hungry. And we didn’t want anybody else to see we had food – we couldn’t bear to share it.’

She also recalled the day of Stalin’s death: ‘When he died I cried, as did almost everybody else at the Conservatory. The news came over on loudspeakers everywhere, accompanied by tragic music by Tchaikovsky. Nobody was overly bothered by the fact that on the same day Prokofiev had also died. Stalin was the father of the nation, the father to everybody, but Prokofiev was just a musician.’

She added that ‘any kind of political discussion was considered dangerous. It was better not to have any. If we were careless in what we said, we were penalised – which is what happened to me later [when she defected to the West]. We all had to study Marxist philosophy, and for a time I believed in that too.’

Her tutors were in many ways noteworthy. Grigory Ginzburg pursued her amorously, to a point where she was forced to complain to the great Alexander Goldenweiser – a friend of Tolstoy and dedicatee of works by Rachmaninov. He tutored her instead, and profoundly shaped her playing. ‘He was a very natural and honest man, who always got to the point,’ she said. ‘He had all the sonatas of Beethoven under his fingers, in his own edition which he carried about with him.’

Among other professors she admired were Emil Gilels, and it was nice to learn from her that his glowing pianism was complemented by the glow of his personality: ‘He was a very decent and cultivated man, modest and considerate, and always ready to help people.’ Other performers would hit the bottle after giving a recital, ‘but he didn’t need the extra stimulus of alcohol – he would just be sociable afterwards, in a very nice way’.

And she loved Rostropovich: ‘Very charming and very funny. What impressed me was his piano-playing when he accompanied his students.’ When asked about David Oistrakh, however, her face darkened: ‘I was careful not to have much to do with him. He was a real Soviet man who toed the party line, and I and my colleagues did not trust him. He was a good musician, but he was working more for the government than for the Conservatory.’

Chief among the keyboard gods with whom she walked was Sviatoslav Richter: ‘Very furtive, working obsessively through the night to “clean” his interpretations. Socially he wasn’t easy-going – you had to approach him carefully, and never ask for details. He was a remarkable, commanding personality, and we all went to his concerts’.

Was he not also Shostakovich’s favourite pianist? ‘Well, it was difficult to say who was that, because Shostakovich wasn’t very straightforward either – he had a very awkward manner. His best friend seemed to be one of my classmates, the pianist Tatiana Nikolayeva, whose repertoire was nothing but Bach and Shostakovich. She was very much a product of the Soviet system – very careful – and she remained so even after the collapse of the Soviet Union.’ But Sulamita was awestruck by Maria Yudina, a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity who was a friend of Boulez and Stockhausen, and who was repeatedly forgiven for her criminal ‘cosmopolitanism’ thanks to the rumour that she was the confidante of Stalin. ‘She was a huge woman who wore a big pectoral cross, and who made the sign of the cross over an audience before playing. When she played, you felt she was in charge of all Russia.’

Several of Sulamita’s fellow students – including Lazar Berman and Tatiana Nikolayeva – went on to become global stars. Her best buddy was Vladimir Ashkenazy, despite their unpromising start in a competition. ‘He was to play first, then I would play after him. When I first saw this little man, six years younger than me, I assumed that he wouldn’t be much of a threat, so I felt quite confident. But then he played – and I knew he would become a great pianist.’ He won the prize. Did she forgive him? She laughed: ‘Of course, and we became lifelong friends. When I went back to Lithuania, he would come to visit – he loved the place. He was like my little brother.’

After graduating at the Moscow Conservatory, Sulamita went back to teach in Vilnius, but she soon had reason to bless that friendship with Ashkenazy. ‘When I came out of the Soviet bloc and was trying to start a career in London – after my accident prevented my playing any more – I had no documents for my qualifications because the Soviet state had impounded and destroyed them in order to punish me – I was written out of history. And therefore I couldn’t prove that I could still work at a high level. So Vladimir wrote a letter of commendation, explaining that despite my accident I was still able to function as a musician. That letter opened many doors.’ A few years after that, Ashkenazy called and said he needed help. ‘His eldest son Vovka, who was 16, had suddenly decided he wanted to become a pianist. Would I please teach him?’ She did so for six years, with the result that Vovka made a career of it.

Sulamita’s defection and her subsequent accident were only part of a huge gear-change in her life; her husband had died prematurely of leukaemia, and she had swiftly married Abram Aronovsky, a Lithuanian-born engineer from Leeds who was also her second cousin. Ashkenazy’s support got her a teaching job at the Royal Northern College of Music, and in due course she moved south to take up a professorship at the Royal Academy of Music, under whose auspices in her Highbury flat she taught until her death.

Meanwhile tragedy had struck again. Her son Balis had followed in his mother’s footsteps as a budding classical pianist, and in his twenties had successfully turned to jazz. But their relationship was never easy, and at the age of 37 he killed himself. From that point until the end of her life, Sulamita never once went back to Lithuania – her remorse over what she perceived as her failure of motherhood was simply too great.

In her elegant apartment in London, with its two big grand pianos, one ever-present object sounded a stridently discordant note: a beaten-up old rock guitar, wedged behind a sofa. She never alluded to it, and as with the car crash, visitors never dared ask about it, because there was no need to: that had been Balis’s guitar. That was the symbolic key to all her work with students and competitions in the later years of her life. That was the key to the fact that, at any given time, she would always tend to focus on one talented and sensitive lost soul among her students, protectively trying to prevent them from going off the rails with drink, drugs or depression.

The esteem in which Sulamita’s judgement was held made her a natural choice for competition jury work and, given her drive and persuasiveness, it was no surprise when she set up her own. The London International Piano Competition was launched in 1991. It got off to a brilliant start – to the extreme displeasure of Fanny Waterman in Leeds – with Sulamita’s old friend Radu Lupu officiating at the piano in the inaugural concert. In the course of its run – the last event was in 2009 – the roster of prize-winners, including Paul Lewis, Simon Trpčeski, Jeremy Denk and Behzod Abduraimov, was testimony to the calibre of its juries. And it was at Sulamita’s insistence that a substantial part of the prize money should be spent on further study.

My own first encounter with Sulamita Aronovsky came about when I was summoned to a posh Islington restaurant where she pleaded the cause of one of her pianistic protégés and asked me to write about him. Her manner was imperious, but I didn’t take the bait. However, I did eavesdrop on a masterclass she was giving at the Royal Academy, and she asked if I too would like a few lessons. My piano-playing had stopped at Grade 8, and I’d spent my life reinforcing bad habits, but as I was curious I said yes, and she clearly relished the irony of having a critic in her clutches.

Thus began a series of conversations stretching over many years with never a dull moment, thanks to her salty wit and worldly wisdom. And the lessons themselves, mostly restricted to Bach and Beethoven, were memorable. Every time I struggled with a new piece, she found an image or a metaphor – something vivid, down-to-earth or comic – that unlocked it; she never let me go home without a new idea. She had no intellectual pretentions, but her judgements had a cool Olympian authority.

Talking to pianists who look back with gratitude on her gruelling tutelage, I have found a rare unanimity, above all regarding her toughness. ‘You had to have a thick skin to survive her acerbic tongue,’ says Pamela Chowhan. ‘On hearing my rendition of a complex piece I was proud to have learnt by heart, her dismaying judgement was “The memory is good … it’s just everything else!”’ Although Sulamita couldn’t play for her students, she did occasionally illustrate particular points, as Ian Flint remembers: ‘She once demonstrated a seven-note rolled chord from Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and it was incredible how much tonal and rhythmic artistry there was in the placement of those seven notes.’ Chowhan also stresses how deeply Sulamita involved herself in her students’ lives: ‘She didn’t just advise on how to play the piano, but also how to dress, how to walk on stage, what to eat, and importantly, whether one’s choice of romantic partner was wise.’

David Fanning’s memories shed revealing light on how Sulamita taught at the beginning of her residence in Britain. ‘To start with,’ he says, ‘it was a case of work on tone production allied to mental and physical freedom (much talk of ‘landings’ and ‘parachutes’) and legato pedalling (featuring the ‘crocodile’). The colourful vocabulary was partly a factor of Sulamita’s recent acquisition of English, but it also served to forge links between technique and imagination. Occasionally it provoked humour – on both sides – that was released in cackling laughter. While playing a Bach fugue I was told, “David, do not touch the neighbours”. I eventually figured out that this meant avoid finger-slips to adjacent notes.’

One such moment, Fanning says, had a profound and long-lasting effect on his development. ‘As part of Sulamita’s back-to-basics regime, I was set to work on Beethoven’s Sonata Op 7. The slow movement, with its opening paired chords punctuated by rests, was an excellent proving ground for top-note balance, tonal blend both within and between chords, and rhythmic discipline. As I diligently strove to calculate the minutiae of all these requirements, I was instructed “David, you should improve the intonation”. Hmm, how exactly …? The clarification came: “The first bar is a reverence” (as in a bow or curtsey). I got the point that “intonation” in this sense was to do not with tuning, but with intoning, in effect a special kind of eloquence. Thinking further about the passage in question, I realised that what I should be doing was not to think of two chords at all, however perfectly weighted, but of a single gesture: something not merely formal but human, evocative of lived experience.’

One of the brightest stars among Sulamita’s more recent students was Nicolas Hodges, Harrison Birtwistle’s pianist of choice and now professor of piano at the Stuttgart Hochschule. ‘Initially I had assumed she wouldn’t take me on,’ he recalls. ‘She sounded just too scary and high-level, but she did. She started by making fun of the mundane exercises I was doing, but my reactions were quick to what she gave me to do, and she liked that. And after a year she suddenly started to laugh – and it was because, she said, my hands looked just like hers. That was because I was watching so carefully what she was doing with her hands. I was once telling people at a party what she was getting me to do, with her in earshot, and she asked me to stop – she was very secretive about her method. She was never for finger-exercises or for talking about technique per se – it was all about colour and expression. And about strategies that made the music seem to happen by itself. About relaxation of the wrist, and the use of arm-weight. She wanted me to bring out the implied orchestral aspects of Beethoven sonatas, and with Bach fugues she never wanted the theme to be simply loud or prominent. It was all about character, and she might only work very intensely on two bars of a piece. It was a way of opening my ears to the music, and on getting the whole balance of the piece right.’

And intense was the word. ‘At times when I was under pressure,’ says Hodges, ‘giving performances and entering competitions, I would go to her every evening at eight and work with her till midnight. And when I got home at one in the morning my phone would ring, and a voice would say ‘Meester Hodges, tomorrow – Bach!’ and the phone would then be put down. The same thing would happen the next evening, and the evening after that, and this could go on for a week.’ And her standards would be stratospherically high. ‘She would sometimes say “Meester Hodges, today is much better. Today is lousy.” Meaning yesterday was even worse than lousy. She once played for me three pages of the Schumann Fantasy, and it was sensational beyond words. Afterwards I asked if it hurt to play that, and she simply said “Yes” and changed the subject.’

‘And she was very kind when I was having troubles,’ Hodges continues. ‘She used to remind me that everyone has troubles, and the important thing was to overcome them, and still play well. I think of her almost every time I play the piano. There is so much stuff in my teaching and playing that comes from her.’

But Sulamita’s lessons did not come cheap: must it not have almost broken the bank to pay for all those extra hours? ‘She used to refer to me as her luxury,’ replies Hodges. ‘As the lessons piled up, the fees could have bought a new car, but my money was just not accepted. And that went on for years. Despite her ferocity, she was an incredibly generous woman.’ One day, in an act heavy with symbolic significance, Sulamita presented Hodges with her dead son’s concert clothes. Yes, saving that lost boy again.

Five years ago Sulamita’s phone rang with an unexpected message from a producer at Lithuanian Radio. In their archive a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings had been found in a box labelled ‘Destroy’, and each recording bore her name. That attempted destruction, she explained to me, had been part of her punishment for defecting. ‘And when I listened to those tapes,’ she said, ‘I thought they weren’t so bad.’ That was typically modest: on the album now available under the title Amity (available as a CD from Bandcamp), her Mozart, Chopin, Ravel, Debussy and Čiurlionis – as a good patriot, she included a piece from Lithuania’s leading painter-composer – are of a very high standard. Thus it became Lithuania’s turn to honour her. ‘At this late stage,’ she said with a wry laugh, ‘I am famous!’

Now, this proudly self-reliant woman, who never complained of her infirmities and who stipulated that there should be no mourners at her cremation, has gone. Among her friends she leaves a host of memories of her kindness and conviviality, if also of imminent danger in the big old Volvo she insisted on driving with carefree abandon long after she should have been stopped. Her musical New Year parties – full of Russian and Lithuanian friends – were riotously joyful events, with gifts for all concerned. And as an unrepentant Corbynista, she was politically very much engaged.

Meanwhile, for generations of young pianists yet to emerge, she has left a more tangible legacy. Her entire estate – which, though she lived simply, was substantial – has been bequeathed to the Royal Academy of Music, to support its Piano Laureates programme. This is a new international project, designed to launch and support the keyboard gods of tomorrow.

Additional research by Zrinka Bottrill

This article originally appeared in the June 2023 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today