Albert Semyonovich Leman (July 7, 1915 – December 3, 1998) was a prominent Soviet and Russian composer, pianist, and educator, later a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and head of its composition department from 1971 to 1997. He was born in the village of Bettinger, now Vorotaevka in the Saratov region, into a Volga German family whose roots in the area went back to the eighteenth century. In the early 1920s, his family moved across the Volga to Volsk to escape famine in the colonies. His father, Semyon (Simon) Ludwigovich Leman, was a musician, conductor, village music teacher, and a maker of violins and pianos, creating the rich musical environment in which Leman grew up. His mother was Rosalia Davidovna Miller, and he was one of seven children in a family where nearly everyone played instruments and took part in домашний quartet music-making; from the age of seven he studied piano, and from the age of twelve he worked as a cinema pianist accompanying silent films, often replacing his father.
At the age of fourteen or fifteen, Leman entered the Astrakhan Music College, and in 1934 he enrolled at the Leningrad Conservatory. There he graduated from the composition class of Mikhail Gnesin and the piano class of Nadezhda Golubovskaya and Vladimir Nielsen, while also studying orchestration under Dmitri Shostakovich. During his student years he was admitted to the Union of Composers of the USSR and began his professional career. His early works included romances on poems by Mikhail Lermontov, a song cycle on verses by Globa, the children's ballet The Three Fat Men, and many chamber pieces. For his graduation examinations he presented a Symphony, a Piano Concerto performed by himself, and vocal works. At the same time he worked in Leningrad as music director of the Children's Theater at the House of Sanitary Culture and later of the artistic education department of the October District House of Pioneers; in 1938 he became head of the music department of the Leningrad City Executive Committee's arts administration.
Even after the outbreak of World War II, Leman continued his work in Leningrad and was commended for extensive concert activity in support of frontline army units. In the autumn of 1941 he sent his wife, E. A. Abrosimova, and their daughter Elsa to Kazan, and he himself was evacuated there later. He lived in Kazan from 1942 to 1970. Because of his German heritage, he was mobilized into the labor army in July 1942 and sent to the Volga railway corrective labor camp of the NKVD for construction of the Sviyazhsk-Ulyanovsk railway, where he worked, according to various accounts, as an electrician, medical orderly, and in cultural-organizational duties. Despite these hardships, he became a central figure in the musical life of Tatarstan.
Leman helped to establish the Kazan Conservatory in 1945 and was invited to teach both composition and piano there. He headed the composition department in 1948–1949 and again in 1961–1969, became professor in 1961, and served as vice-rector for academic and research work from 1964 to 1967. In 1969–1971 he also taught at the Petrozavodsk Conservatory, then a branch of the Leningrad Conservatory. He is considered one of the founders of the Tatar composition school and trained many important musicians in Kazan, among them Sofia Gubaidulina, Ismay Shamsutdinov, Enver Bakirov, Khusnulla Valiullin, Elsa Akhmetova, and others. He joined the Communist Party in 1964.
In 1970, Leman moved to Moscow, where he served as professor and head of the composition department at the Moscow Conservatory until 1997. He was a highly respected pedagogue whose themes were frequently used by applicants for entrance examination variation or passacaglia assignments. Among his students there and elsewhere were Sofia Gubaidulina, Gleb Sedelnikov, Marina Kollontai, Azamat Khasanshin, Dmitry Cheglakov, Olesya Rostovskaya, and others. He was awarded the Stalin Prize, third class, in 1952 for his Violin Concerto, became an Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1957, an Honored Art Worker of the Chuvash ASSR in 1965, and was designated People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1968.
Leman's compositional output includes symphonic works, concertos, cantatas, oratorios, and choral music, often reflecting the folk traditions of the regions where he lived. Notable works include the symphonic suite Tatar Tunes, the prize-winning Violin Concerto, the Third Piano Concerto, the oratorio Songs of Pomorye, the choral cycle Vyatka Songs, the cantata My Karelia, the Concerto for Three Flutes and String Orchestra, and the musical-dramatic work Voices of the Times for chorus, soloists, reciters, and orchestra. He died in Moscow in 1998 and was buried in St. Petersburg at the Volkov Lutheran Cemetery.
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