We Piano Teachers and Our Demons / Landscapes: the Arts, Aesthetics, and Education Bd.32 (PDF)

Zecharia Plavin was born in 1956, Lithuanian Vilnius, then under the Soviet regime. He studied in the famous Ciurlionis School of arts under Marietta Azizbekova, herself a student of Samuil Feinberg in Moscow Conservatoire. At age 21, Plavin immigrated to Israel, studied piano under Professor Viktor Derevianko and completed his piano studies under Louis Kentner in London, writing a Ph.D. research on Ernest Bloch for the Hebrew University. Receiving the Shapira award in 1980, he began concertizing playing with Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and later performing in the USA and many European countries. In 1990, he started teaching piano at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance. In 2000, Plavin founded the short-lived Israeli Musicians' Forum to promote musicians' professional rights in the country, simultaneously widening the scope of his academic expertise into areas of culture, philosophy, and protection of human rights. His texts on Ernest Bloch and Ben-Zion Orgad appeared inbooks issued by Cambridge University Press and Ben Gurion University Press. Since 2007, his compositions started being performed by his colleagues and have been presented in Israel, USA, Lithuania, Hong Kong, and Germany.



Plavin keeps combining concert activities with research and composition, playing both Beethoven, Schumann, and Liszt and works by Karl Amadeus Hartmann, Ernest Bloch, Hans Kox, Rued Langgaard, and Ben-Zion Orgad. His former piano students Ofra Ytzkhaki and Nizar Elkhatter feature ever more prominently on the concert stages of Israel and Western Europe.