Boris Lyatoshinsky

Boris Lyatoshinsky was a Ukrainian Soviet composer, conductor, and teacher, one of the founders of the modernist trend in Ukrainian music. He was born in Zhytomyr on December 22, 1894 (January 3, 1895, New Style), and died in Kyiv on April 15, 1968.

He was born into an интеллигент family. His father, Mykola Lyatoshinsky, was a teacher who, alongside his pedagogical work, was also engaged in scholarly activity in the field of history. As director of various gymnasiums, he carried out public and educational work in Zhytomyr, Nemyriv, and Zlatopil. His mother, Olha, played the piano well and sang.

In 1918 Lyatoshinsky graduated from the law faculty of Saint Vladimir Kyiv University, and in 1919 he graduated from the Kyiv Conservatory, where he studied composition with Reinhold Gliere. From 1920 he taught at the Kyiv Conservatory, becoming a professor in 1935. In 1935–1938 and 1941–1944 he was also a professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory. From 1944 to 1949 he headed the department of music theory at the Kyiv Tchaikovsky Conservatory.

He was head of the Association of Contemporary Music, active from 1926 to 1929, and served in the organizing bodies of the Union of Composers of Ukraine and later the Union of Composers of the USSR. In 1939–1941 he was head, and later a board member, of the Union of Composers of the Ukrainian SSR. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War he was evacuated to Saratov, where the Moscow Conservatory was already located, and he continued his teaching there. In Saratov he also took part, together with his wife Margarita Tsarevich, in broadcasts of the Taras Shevchenko radio station for the partisan underground in Ukraine.

His wartime years were especially productive. Over three years he wrote the Ukrainian Quintet, String Quartet No. 4, a Suite on Ukrainian Folk Themes for string quartet, a Suite for woodwind quartet, Piano Trio No. 2, a Suite and Preludes for piano, and songs on poems by Maksym Rylsky and Volodymyr Sosyura. He also arranged more than eighty Ukrainian folk songs.

In the summer of 1944 Lyatoshinsky returned to Ukraine and immediately rejoined Kyiv's musical life. From that year until his death he lived in the Rolit writers' building in Kyiv. He was appointed artistic director of the Ukrainian Philharmonic, worked as a musical consultant for the Radio Committee, and taught at the Kyiv Conservatory. Among his students were Leonid Hrabovsky, Ivan Karabyts, Yevhen Stankovych, Yan Frenkel, and Ihor Shamo.

The late 1940s and the 1950s became another fruitful stage in his creative work. During this period he wrote a number of choral and orchestral works, songs, and film scores. Among his most significant creations are Symphony No. 3, the symphonic ballad Grazhyna, Poem of Reunification, the poem On the Banks of the Vistula, and a piano concerto. His choruses on texts by Taras Shevchenko and Alexander Pushkin became an important contribution to the Ukrainian choral heritage of the postwar years.

His output included the operas The Golden Ring and Shchors, later revised as The Commander, as well as five symphonies, three symphonic poems, five string quartets, songs, cantatas, and music for stage productions and films. He composed music for films including Ivan, Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, Hryhoriy Skovoroda, and The Flying Ship.

Despite his outstanding contribution to Ukrainian music, Lyatoshinsky was criticized by the authorities during the Soviet campaign against formalism. He received the title People's Artist of the Ukrainian SSR in 1968 and won two Stalin Prizes, in 1946 for the Ukrainian Quintet and in 1952 for the music to the film Taras Shevchenko. He was buried at Baikove Cemetery in Kyiv.

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