Olga Averino

Olga Averino (November 15, 1895 – January 17, 1989) was a Russian-born soprano and voice teacher. A white émigré to the United States in the wake of the Russian Civil War, she was prominent in the musical life of Boston for over 60 years, first as a singer and later as a distinguished voice teacher.

Olga Averino was born into a family of musicians in Moscow in 1895. Her father, Nicholas Averino, was a violist and director of the music conservatory in Rostov. Her mother, Olga Laroche, was a pianist, the daughter of the Russian musicologist Herman Laroche and the god-daughter of the composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Averino, herself was the god-daughter of the composer's brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky. She trained in piano and voice at the Moscow Conservatory and married the violinist Paul Fedorovsky. In 1918, the Bolshevik Revolution and ensuing civil war led the young couple to flee Russia with their baby daughter. They travelled across Siberia to Vladivostok and down into Manchuria. After living in Beijing for several years, they eventually made their way to the United States, settling in Boston in 1924 where Fedorovsky became a violinist in the Boston Symphony Orchestra; Averino appeared frequently as a soprano soloist.

She was a regular soloist with the Boston Symphony during the Koussvitzky era. Amongst the many works in which she performed there, were Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Bach's Mass in B Minor, Ravel's Sheherazade, Debussy's Martyrdom of St. Sebastian, and the American premiére of Alban Berg's Lied der Lulu. During her long career as a performer she sang in lieder, oratorio and opera and worked with many prominent 20th century composers including Ravel, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff, and Glazunov. She was a noted recitalist and is credited with having established the success of Ravel's Chansons madecasses in the United States. She also toured the United States in a series of joint recitals with the cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, where her accompanist was Alexander Siloti, the last pupil of Franz Liszt.

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