Gregor Piatigorsky (, Grigoriy Pavlovich Pyatigorskiy; August 6, 1976) was a Russian Empire-born American cellist. Biography Early life Gregor Piatigorsky was born in Ekaterinoslav (now Dnipro, Ukraine) into a Jewish family. As a child, he was taught violin and piano by his father. After seeing and hearing the cello, he was determined to become a cellist and was given his first cello when he was seven. Piatigorsky won a scholarship to the Moscow Conservatory, studying with Alfred von Glehn, Anatoliy Brandukov, and a certain Gubariov. At the same time, he was earning money for his family by playing in local cafés. Piatigorsky was 13 when the Russian Revolution took place. Shortly afterwards, he started playing in the Lenin Quartet. At 15, he was hired as the principal cellist for the Bolshoi Theater. The Soviet authorities, specifically Anatoly Lunacharsky, would not allow Piatigorsky 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 heavy-set 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, Piatigorsky studied briefly in Berlin and Leipzig, with Hugo Becker and Julius Klengel, playing in a trio in a Russian café to earn money for food. Among the patrons of the café were Emanuel Feuermann and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Furtwängler heard Piatigorsky and hired him as the principal cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic. United States In 1929, Piatigorsky first visited the United States, playing with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Leopold Stokowski and the New York Philharmonic under Willem Mengelberg. In Ann Arbor, Michigan, in January 1937 he married Jacqueline de Rothschild, daughter of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild of the wealthy Rothschild banking family of France. That fall, after returning to France, they had their first child, daughter Jephta. Following the Nazi occupation in World War II, the family fled the country back to the States and settled in Elizabethtown in the Adirondack Mountains, New York. Their son, Joram, was born in Elizabethtown in 1940. From 1941 to 1949, Piatigorsky 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, the last of which he remained associated with until his