Eduard Grikurov was a Soviet opera conductor and music teacher. He was born on 11 April 1907 in Tiflis, then part of the Russian Empire, now Tbilisi, Georgia. He studied at the Tbilisi Conservatory, where he trained in piano with A. I. Tulashvili and in music theory and composition with M. M. Ippolitov-Ivanov and S. V. Barkhudaryan. He later continued his studies at the Leningrad Conservatory, graduating in 1933 as a conductor in the class of Aleksandr Gauk.
After a brief collaboration with the V. V. Andreyev Russian Folk Instruments Orchestra, Grikurov began work in 1937 at the Maly Opera Theatre. His entire later conducting career was associated with this theater. From 1944 to 1969 he served as its chief conductor, with a break from 1956 to 1960, when he led the orchestra of the S. M. Kirov Leningrad Academic Theater of Opera and Ballet.
Grikurov also taught conducting at the Rimsky-Korsakov Leningrad Conservatory, where he became a professor in 1971. Among his students were Shamgon Kazhgaliyev, Alexander Alekseyev, Vakhtang Jordania, Dmitri Kitayenko, and D. V. Smirnov.
He conducted more than thirty productions. Among them were Falstaff by Giuseppe Verdi, Pagliacci by Ruggero Leoncavallo, The Golden Cockerel by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Cavalleria rusticana by Pietro Mascagni, Lakmé by Léo Delibes, La bohème by Giacomo Puccini, The Young Guard by Yuliy Meitus, War and Peace and The Love for Three Oranges by Sergei Prokofiev, Virineya by Sergei Slonimsky, and Antony and Cleopatra by Samuel Barber.
Particular attention was drawn to Grikurov's work on the 1965 revival of the opera Katerina Izmailova. Sofia Khentova wrote that the musical side of the production was strong above all because of his careful and subtle work, and that he had essentially created his own performance edition of the opera. She praised the flexible tempos he found for the swift dramatic action and described the orchestra under his direction as almost the main “hero” of the performance.
In cinema, he was credited for the film Son of Mongolia in 1936. His distinctions included Honored Art Worker of the RSFSR in 1954, People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1957, and the Stalin Prize, second class, in 1951 for conducting the opera production The Young Guard by Yuliy Meitus.
Grikurov died on 13 December 1982 in Leningrad. He was buried there at Bogoslovskoye Cemetery.
Connections
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