Oleg Kagan was a leading classical violinist from the former Soviet Union who achieved international fame in the 1970s through collaborations with pianists Sviatoslav Richter and Elisabeth Leonskaja and cellist Natalia Gutman. Born just after World War II, he was encouraged to take up music by his doctor father and when the family moved to Riga, Latvia, he studied there and then in Moscow. He won the International Jean Sibelius Violin Competition in 1965 and the International Johann Sebastian Bach Competition three years later.
He studied with Boris Kuznetsov and David Oistrakh and recorded the Mozart concertos and works by Tchaikovsky and Brahms. He performed a great deal of music by 20th century Russian composers as well as Hindemith, Messiaen, Beethoven and Ravel. The recordings he made behind the Iron Curtain were later released in the West and he toured internationally.
From 1969, he played a great deal of chamber music in collaborations with Richter and Gutman and later with pianist Vasily Lobanov. Kagan was stricken with cancer in 1989 and he died the following year aged 43. Naxos Records' biography of him praises his "expressive manipulations of tone" and says, "It is the energy and vitality he brought to performances of twentieth-century music that will be missed the most, in a tragically curtailed career."
