By Carol Merrill-Mirsky Piatigorsky spent the first eighteen years of his life in Ukraine, where he was born, and Russia, where he studied at the Moscow Conservatory. An itinerant cellist from the age of eight, self-supporting from the age of twelve, he joined the orchestra at the Bolshoi Theater as principal cellist before his fifteenth…Continue Reading From The Piatigorsky Archives – Part 3: Piatigorsky In Russia