Serge Koussevitzky (born Sergey Aleksandrovich Kusevitsky;[n 1] Russian: Сергей Александрович Кусевицкий, IPA: [sʲɪrˈɡʲej ɐlʲɪkˈsandrəvʲɪtɕ kʊsʲɪˈvʲitskʲɪj]; 26 July [O.S.

14 July] 1874 – 4 June 1951) was a Russian and American conductor, composer, and double-bassist, known for his long tenure as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra from 1924 to 1949.

[2] At the age of fourteen he received a scholarship to the Musico-Dramatic Institute of the Moscow Philharmonic Society,[3] where he studied double bass with Rambusek[2] and music theory.

[5] He soon resigned from the Bolshoi, and the couple moved to Berlin, where Serge studied conducting under Arthur Nikisch, using his wife's wealth to pay off his teacher's gambling debts.

The next year he and his wife returned to Russia, where he founded his own orchestra in Moscow and branched out into the publishing business, forming his own firm, Éditions Russes de Musique, and buying the catalogues of many of the greatest composers of the age.

Together with Gertrude Robinson Smith he played a central role in developing the orchestra's internationally acclaimed summer concert and educational programs at Tanglewood where today the 5,700-seat main performance venue bears his name.

In the early 1940s, he discovered a young tenor named Alfred Cocozza (who would later be known as Mario Lanza), and provided him with a scholarship to attend Tanglewood.

Olga Naumova was the daughter of the distinguished politician and civil servant Aleksandr Naumov (1868, Simbirsk – 1950, Nice, France) who served as Minister of Agriculture in the Russian Imperial Cabinet.

4 (which Prokofiev later revised), Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass, and Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, as well as works by Albert Roussel and Howard Hanson.

[20] In 1922, Koussevitzky commissioned Maurice Ravel's arrangement of Modest Mussorgsky's 1874 suite for piano, Pictures at an Exhibition, which was premiered on 19 October that year[14] and quickly became the most famous and celebrated orchestration of the work.

In 1940, Koussevitzky commissioned Randall Thompson, then a professor at the University of Virginia and director of the men's Glee club, to write a new piece for performance at Tanglewood.

Koussevitzky had a large-scale festival piece in mind, but with World War II underway and France having fallen to Germany, Thompson could not find such an inspiration.

The instrument now bears the names of both Karr and Koussevitzky, and has been played by bassist Scott Pingel and the San Francisco Academy Orchestra.

Koussevitzky's final recordings, made in November 1950, on magnetic tape using RCA's proprietary RT-21 two-track, 1⁄4-inch machines at 30 inches per second, were acclaimed performances of Sibelius's Second Symphony and Grieg's "The Last Spring".

Koussevitzky rerecorded the piece in Tanglewood with Eleanor Roosevelt narrating during the summer of 1950 on magnetic tape; originally issued on a ten-inch LP and three 45 rpm records, it has never been reissued officially by RCA in spite of the popularity of the Camden disc with Hale.