Pavel V. Lutsker
Born into a family of secondary school teachers.
Fr om 1966 to 1977, he studied at the Republican Boarding School of Music and Fine Arts (now the I. O. Akhremchik Gymnasium-College of Arts) in the violin class. He then graduated with honors from the ITK Faculty of the Gnessin State Musical Pedagogical Institute (now the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music), wh ere his special-class teacher was A. G. Chugaev.
Upon graduation fr om the institute, he served in the army (from June 1982 to December 1983) in the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany, wh ere he also completed three-month officer training courses.
1984–1986 — Methodologist at the Inter-Union House of Amateur Creative Work under the Moscow City Council of Trade Unions.
1986–1988 — Junior Research Fellow in the Manuscript Department of the M. I. Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture.
From 1988 to the present — Junior Research Fellow, later Senior Research Fellow, and from June 2013, Leading Research Fellow at the State Institute of Art Studies of the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, in the Sector of Classical Art of Western European Countries.
2005 — Head of the Broadcast Planning Department at Radio Kultura; 2008–2013 — Deputy Director of Programming at Radio Orpheus.
From 2009 — Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Cultural Economics at the Faculty of Management of the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music; from 2013 — Associate Professor in the Department of Musical Applied Arts at the same academy; from 2017 to the present — Associate Professor, then Professor in the Department of Analytical Musicology.
In 1999-2000 and 2001, P. V. Lutsker taught at the Faculty of Musicology at the University of Münster. He has won research grants three times (Austria, Germany, Italy) and five times grants from the Russian Foundation for the Humanities.
In 1990, he defended his Candidate of Sciences dissertation (PhD equivalent) on the topic «Mozart’s Operatic Works in the Context of Enlightenment Culture» (supervisor: R. K. Shirinyan), specializing in musicology. In 2016, he defended his Doctor of Sciences dissertation on «The Tradition of Italian Comic Opera in the 17th — First Half of the 18th Century: Genesis and Poetics of Genres».
Pedagogical Activity
P. V. Lutsker teaches courses in musical form, polyphony, and music analysis in the context of the arts; he supervises master’s theses and dissertations. He has developed curricula for new courses in the analysis of opera and ballet performances, music analysis in the context of the arts and contemporary media, and an original polyphony course for composers.
Research Activity
P. V. Lutsker is the author of over 70 scholarly articles, four monographs (co-authored with I. P. Susidko), and four teaching manuals. His research interests include the history and theory of Western European music from the 17th to the 20th centuries, polyphony, musical form and analysis of musical works, the history of opera theater, and libretto studies.
For the book Italian Opera of the 18th Century, he received a commendation from the Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation.
In 2000, P. V. Lutsker completed a translation from German (together with M. V. Zorka) of B. Weikl’s book On Singing and Other Skills for the Agraf publishing house. Together with S. Grokhotov, he compiled, translated, and provided scholarly commentaries for the book Mozart in Stories and Anecdotes of His Contemporaries, published by Klassika XXI in 2007
P. V. Lutsker’s creative biography includes presentations at numerous international conferences in Russia and abroad.
Creative and educational activities
From 2009 to 2017, P. V. Lutsker served as the organizer of the annual young composers’ competition on Radio Orpheus, as well as Radio Orpheus’s representative at the annual international competition The Rostrum of Composers under the auspices of UNESCO, and on the jury of the international (European) ICMA (International Classical Music Award) in the field of classical music recording. He also produced a number of program series for Radio Orpheus.
P. V. Lutsker is the academic supervisor of productions of early Italian operas at the Gnesin Russian Academy of Music as part of the project «Opera at the Court of Russian Empresses (2024-2026),» which includes Russian and world premieres.
He has repeatedly delivered public lectures at the Diaghilev Festival (Perm), at the Cultural Center at the Italian Embassy in Russia, in the online program «Scientists Against Myths,» and at the Bolshoi Theatre. He is the author of program booklets for several operas staged at the Bolshoi Theatre.
