Dmitry Feofanov

Dmitry Nikolaevich Feofanov (born January 12, 1957) is an American pianist and musicologist of Russian origin. He was born in Moscow and graduated from the Academic Music College affiliated with the Moscow Conservatory in 1976.

In 1978 he emigrated to the United States, where he earned a Master of Music degree from the University of Illinois in 1981. He later taught music history for a time at the University of Kentucky. In 1984 he published the collection Rare Masterpieces of Russian Piano Music, featuring works by Hessler, Glinka, Griboyedov, Balakirev, Kalinnikov, Lyadov, Glazunov, Taneyev, Medtner, and Schlozer.

Feofanov subsequently chose not to pursue music as his main career and retrained as a lawyer, graduating from the law school of the Illinois Institute of Technology. From 1994 he has practiced law, specializing in “lemon laws,” focusing on consumer compensation for malfunctioning products, especially automobiles. In 2011 he became the subject of a legal scandal when an opposing party in court accused him of using his young, attractive wife as an assistant to distract participants from the substance of the case.

Alongside his legal work, Feofanov has continued to perform and publish as a musician and musicologist. In 1995 he recorded an album of music by Charles-Valentin Alkan for the Naxos label with conductor Robert Stankovsky. Some later appearances as a pianist were made under the pseudonym Vitlaus von Horn; he has been credited with the first performance of Johann Wilhelm Hässler’s cycle of 360 preludes.

In 1989, together with Allan Ho of Southern Illinois University, Feofanov published the Biographical Dictionary of Russian/Soviet Composers. Their best-known book, Shostakovich Reconsidered (1999), argued that Solomon Volkov’s published record of conversations with Dmitri Shostakovich was not a forgery, contrary to what the authors described as the dominant view in professional musicology. Critics accused the authors of employing questionable methods, and scholar Pauline Fairclough wrote that after Laurel Fay published an article questioning Volkov’s Testimony, the ensuing smear campaign against Fay—largely inspired by Feofanov and Ho—was unprecedented in Western musicology.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the art history graph.