Biography
A staunch proponent of the Russian Cantabile musical tradition, cellist and composer Illarion Gershkovich, a San Francisco native, currently studies at the Royal College of Music, supported by the Humphrey Searle scholarship. After two years studying the cello and organic chemistry at the Oberlin College and Conservatory, Illarion relocated to London in order to pursue composition professionally. At present, he studies the cello with Alexander Boyarsky and composition with Kenneth Hesketh.
Illarion began studying the cello at eight years old with Sergei Riabtchenko, and has received tutelage from Moscow Conservatory Professor Igor Gavrysh and Oberlin Conservatory Professor Dmitry Kouzov. In 2018, he won second place in the American Protégé Music Competition, performing at Carnegie Hall, and has since appeared as a soloist with the Golden Gate Symphony Orchestra and the San Domenico Virtuoso Program Orchestra da Camera.Illarion also has a strong background in chamber music, intensively studying Dmitri Shostakovich’s string quartets with students of the original performers while in high school.
More recently, Illarion organized a concert of Russian Salon Music at the Oberlin Conservatory in collaboration with the Russian Department. For the concert, he not only curated a historically informed concert program based on musical salons of late 19th century Russia, but also extended the practice into the modern day, incorporating works by later Russian composers which could have been involved had the tradition continued.
As a composer, Illarion premiered his first orchestral piece, Rain (2017), at age twelve with the Golden Gate Symphony. In 2019, his Double Cello Concerto was premiered in Washington D.C. in collaboration with Dr. Tanya Anisimova, with whom Illarion later began formal composition training. Starting in high school, his works for string orchestra, including Fantaisie in G-sharp minor (2022) and Désolé (2023), have been performed by the Virtuoso Program Orchestra da Camera.
Recently, the scherzo movement of his first Piano Quartet was premiered by the faculty ensemble at the Chee-Yun and Friends Music Festival (2024), where Illarion’s string arrangements of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations, and Wieniawski’s Violin Concerto No.2 were also performed by the festival orchestra. Upcoming projects include: a sonata for cello and guitar, his First Symphony, and a ballet based on Alexander Pushkin’s The Undertaker, which is set to be premiered at the Great Exhibitionists concert series at the Royal College of Music in late March 2026.
