Alexander Harutyunyan
Alexander Harutyunyan was an Armenian and Soviet composer, film composer, pianist, and music teacher. He was born in Yerevan on September 23, 1920, and died there on March 28, 2012.
From 1934 to 1941, he studied composition with S. V. Barkhudaryan and V. G. Talyan, and piano with O. A. Babasyan, at the Komitas Conservatory in Yerevan. He continued his piano studies with K. N. Igumnov in 1942–43, then studied composition and counterpoint with Khachatur S. Kushnarev in 1944–46. From 1946 to 1948, he pursued further study in composition, orchestration, analysis, and piano at the studio of the Armenian House of Culture in Moscow.
Harutyunyan performed as a solo pianist, often playing his own works. He led the Armenian Philharmonic from 1954 to 1990. From 1965 to 2008, he taught composition at the Yerevan Conservatory and became a professor in 1977. He also served on the juries of international competitions in Moscow, Poznań, Narbonne, and other cities.
His musical style drew on Armenian musical traditions, including the improvisational practices of ashugs, Armenian folk singer-poets, alongside classical and Romantic forms. His works include the opera Sayat-Nova (1967), a symphony (1957), the cantata About the Homeland (1948), and concertos for piano, trumpet, horn, oboe, and other instruments. From the 1960s and 1970s, he increasingly favored clarity and classical forms; later works combined elements from different styles.
Among his later works are concertos for trombone and tuba, noted in the article as the first concert works for those instruments in Armenian music, and the violin concerto Armenia-88, dedicated to the victims of the Spitak earthquake. With Arno Babajanyan, he wrote the two-piano concert pieces Armenian Rhapsody and Festive. Harutyunyan also wrote music for films, including Ghosts Leave the Peaks (1955), The Heart Sings (1956), and Naapet (1977).
Harutyunyan received the Stalin Prize, First Degree, in 1949 for About the Homeland, and was named People's Artist of the USSR in 1970. He was buried in the Komitas Pantheon in Yerevan.