Yevsey Zak

Yevsey Solomonovich (Zelmanovich) Zak was a Moldovan Soviet pianist and music educator, born on November 7, 1921, in Cetatea Albă (Akkerman), Bessarabia. His father, Zelman Solomonovich Zak, was a bank employee and economist, and his mother, Rosalia Yevseyevna Zak, was a housewife. He began taking private piano lessons in his childhood, but these were cut short when he was 13 years old. Following his father's death, the family was left without financial support, and his mother found work as a cashier. As a result, his music studies ceased for a time.

After the annexation of Bessarabia by the USSR, Zak and his mother relocated to Chișinău. At the outbreak of World War II, they were evacuated to Tashkent. It was there that he was admitted to the Leningrad Conservatory, which had also been evacuated to the city. Between 1943 and 1944, he worked in the orchestra of the Tashkent Operetta Theater. He later moved to Leningrad, where he worked at a music club and taught at a military school from 1946 to 1948.

In 1948, Zak graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory, where he had studied in the class of Vera Kharitonovna Razumovskaya. That same year, he moved to Chișinău and began his career as a soloist with the Moldovan State Philharmonic. He frequently performed with the Moldovan Symphony Orchestra and participated in various chamber ensembles. He also spent a period from 1956 to 1957 teaching at the Alma-Ata Conservatory in Kazakhstan.

Upon his return to Chișinău, Zak collaborated with violinist Yakov Soroker to record the complete Beethoven sonatas for the Chișinău Radio Committee. He also performed in a piano duo with Lyudmila Vaverko. A champion of local composers, he was the first performer of the Piano Sonata by Vasily Zagorsky and the Poem-Sonata for cello and piano by Alexei Styrcha.

Zak's pedagogical career was extensive and influential. Starting in 1961, he taught piano at the music school affiliated with the Chișinău Conservatory. He rose through the academic ranks, becoming a senior lecturer, then an associate professor, and ultimately a professor in the special piano department of the conservatory (later renamed the G. Muzicescu Institute of Arts), a position he held until 1995. He authored several methodological and musicological works, including analyses of piano pieces by Chopin, Sviridov, Kabalevsky, and Debussy.

In his later years, Zak moved to Germany in 1995 and subsequently to Israel in 1998, where he passed away in 2008. He left a significant legacy in the piano culture of Moldova, having trained approximately fifty pianists and music teachers. Among his notable students are Alla Brosterman, Anna Kopanskaya, Oleg Maisenberg, and the Romanian pianist Valentina Popovciuc.

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