Violinist Lydia Mordkovitch died yesterday (9 December in London). Mordkovitch was born in Saratov, southeastern Russia, on 30 April 1944. She studied at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory under David Oistrakh, serving as his assistant from 1968 to 1970. She won the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud Competition in Paris in 1969. After a period in Israel from 1974 and 1979, she moved permanently to the UK in 1980. Since 1995 she has been a professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London. She made a lot of recordings, especially for Chandos.