Daniil Frenkel
Daniil Frenkel was a Soviet Russian composer, film composer, conductor, and pianist. He was born in Kyiv on 15 September 1906. He studied piano as a child, then attended the Odessa Conservatory from 1925 to 1928, studying piano with Yakov Tkach. From 1928 to 1929 he advanced his piano technique with Sergey Alpers at the Second Leningrad Music College. He studied theory and composition with Arseny Gladkovsky from 1932 to 1935, and orchestration with Maximilian Steinberg from 1936 to 1938.
From 1922 to 1924, Frenkel worked as a cinema pianist in Balta; from 1928 to 1932, he was a pianist for Soyuzkino in Leningrad. He led the music department and conducted at the Orenburg Regional Drama Theatre from 1941 to 1944, then worked at the Leningrad Comedy Theatre named for V. F. Komissarzhevskaya from 1945 to 1947. From 1945 to 1953, he led an amateur ensemble of the Navy. He wrote romances to poems by Alexander Pushkin, Yevgeny Baratynsky, Alexander Blok, and Stepan Shchipachyov, as well as music for films.
Frenkel's stage works included the operas The Law and Pharaoh (1933), In the Gorge (1934), Dawn (1937), Diana and Teodoro (1944), Gloomy River (1951; revised 1953), The Dowryless Girl (1959), Giordano Bruno (1966), The Death of Ivan the Terrible (1970), and Rybakov's Son (1977). He also wrote the ballets Catherine Lefebvre (1960) and Ulysses (1967), and the operettas The Blue Dragonfly (1948) and Dangerous Voyage (1954).
His other works included three symphonies, a piano concerto, a piano and orchestra fantasy, five symphonic etudes, the cantatas The Sacred War, Russia, At Midnight by the Mausoleum, and The Last Morning, two string quartets, a piano quintet, three piano sonatas, and the vocal cycle Earth.