Alemdar Karamanov
Alemdar Karamanov was a Soviet and Ukrainian composer. Born in Simferopol on 10 September 1934, he wrote 24 symphonies as well as piano, chamber, choral, vocal-symphonic, ballet and film music. He died in Simferopol on 3 May 2007.
Karamanov grew up in a family with a piano. His mother, Polina Karamanova, introduced him to musical notation and piano playing, and he entered the music school attached to the Simferopol Music College in 1941, when he was seven. He studied there with Eva Seferova and later Irina Briskina, wrote down his first composition at the age of seven, and set a poem on the liberation of Sevastopol to music at ten. After graduating from general school, he entered the Simferopol Music College in 1949 and completed its course in 1953.
In 1953 he entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, graduating from its composition department under Semyon Bogatyrev and its piano department under Vladimir Natanson. He then undertook postgraduate study from 1958 to 1963 with Dmitry Kabalevsky and Tikhon Khrennikov. During his conservatory years he composed ten symphonies. Works from this period include the Fifth Symphony-Dramatic Oratorio, V. I. Lenin, to words by Vladimir Mayakovsky; the Seventh Symphony, Moon Sea; two piano concertos; Oriental Capriccio for violin and orchestra; the Second String Quartet; and Ave Maria for piano. With Yevgeny Krylatov, he composed the ballet Komsomolia, staged at the Bolshoi Theatre in 1957; his ballet Stronger than Love was staged in Leningrad in 1961.
Between 1962 and July 1964, Karamanov became associated with the musical avant-garde, alongside Andrei Volkonsky, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov and Sofia Gubaidulina. His works of this period include Music No. 1 and No. 2 for piano, the piano triptych Prologue, Thought and Epilogue, the children’s pieces Window into Music, and concert fugues. He also adopted new compositional methods, including twelve-tone technique.
Karamanov left Moscow for his native Simferopol in 1965. That year he was baptized and became a parishioner of the Church of All Saints. He subsequently concentrated chiefly on sacred symphonic and vocal-symphonic music, including the Gospel-based cycle It Is Finished, the Revelation-based cycle It Came to Pass, Stabat Mater (1967), Requiem (1971), Messe (1973), the piano concerto Ave Maria (1968), and the symphonic cycle Et in amorem vivificantem. His later output also included the Seventeenth Symphony, America; the oratorio The Legend and Reality of Adzhimushkai; the Twenty-Fourth Symphony, Adzhimushkai; and the oratorio Chersonesus.
His music was performed in Czechoslovakia in 1991, and a London presentation in 1995 included the Third Piano Concerto, Ave Maria, and Stabat Mater. Recordings issued during the 1990s included the Twenty-Second and Twenty-Third Symphonies under Vladimir Ashkenazy, the Twentieth and Twenty-Third Symphonies under Vladimir Fedoseyev, and the Third Symphony and Third Piano Concerto under Antonio de Almeida. Karamanov also composed music for documentary, television and feature films. In his final years, renewed interest in his work led to premieres in Kyiv, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Krasnodar and Saratov. His last composition was the unfinished opera The Farewells of Chrysostom, for which he wrote the libretto. He was named People’s Artist of Ukraine in 1994 and received the Taras Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine in 2000.