‘We learnt from her a love and respect for music’ - cellist Natalia Shakhovskaya

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The Russian cellist Natalia Shakhovskaya (1935–2017) was one of the 20th century’s most prominent advocates for the cello. Keeping a low profile, partly because of the Soviet era’s political restrictions but also due to her own integrity, through her pedagogy she extended the lineage of the Russian cello school into our times. Although for most of her lifetime she stayed in Russia, where she became a teaching celebrity, her Moscow studio attracted cello students from all corners of the world. Her influence spread even further when she became a professor in Madrid. The list of her students includes many leading cellists, such as Boris Andrianov, Fernando Arias, Suren Bagratuni, Pablo Ferrández, Carmen María Elena González, Truls Mørk, Alexander Ramm, Kirill Rodin, Denis Shapovalov, Daniel Veis, Sonia Wieder-Atherton and Shakhovskaya’s own daughter Olga Galochkina, to name but a few…