Fabian Vitacek
Fabian Vitacek (17 January 1910 – 11 September 1983) was a Soviet musician, composer, and teacher. He was born and died in Moscow. His father was the noted violin maker Yevgeny Vitacek, and his mother was the violinist Yelizaveta Gnesina-Vitacek.
Vitacek showed exceptional musical ability in childhood and entered the Gnesin School at the age of six. He studied piano with his aunts Maria Gnesina and Yelena Gnesina, and violin with his mother. At twelve he composed the opera Grandfather and the Turnip. His gifts were noted by Yelena Gnesina in a letter to Sergei Rachmaninoff and later by Leonid Sabaneyev.
He studied composition with Reinhold Glière at the Gnesin technical school, completing that class in 1928, and finished his piano studies there in 1930. He appeared in concerts both as a soloist and as an accompanist. After entering the Moscow Conservatory in 1929, he completed its composition course in two years, studying first with Nikolai Zhilyayev and then, in 1930–1931, with Nikolai Myaskovsky. His graduation work was the cantata 18 March, to words by Nikolai Aseev.
In subsequent years, Vitacek frequently performed his own works. From 1932 he was the regular accompanist of the singer Nadezhda Verbova, who praised his brilliant pianism, refined ensemble sense, and exceptional erudition.
Vitacek taught throughout much of his career. He served as an assistant in the instrumentation department of the Moscow Conservatory in 1935 and from 1937 to 1938. Beginning in 1937, he taught composition and instrumentation at the Gnesin State Music School. During his evacuation to Yelatma and Kazan in 1941–1942, he taught at the Kazan Music School. From 1944 he taught score reading and instrumentation at the Gnesin State Musical Pedagogical Institute, becoming a professor in 1974 and continuing there until his death. Between 1943 and 1956, he also taught music literature at the Moscow Conservatory.
His more than thirty compositions include the cantata 18 March (1931), a suite on Mari and Udmurt themes (1933), two piano concertos (1935 and 1939), the Concert Suite for cello and orchestra (1940), Crimean Suite for orchestra (1937), five Heroic Preludes (1942), a symphony (1943; Op. 16, 1944), the ballet Pushkin's Tales, and the Festive Overture (1958), performed at the opening of the Gnesin Institute's concert hall.
A prominent theorist of orchestration, Vitacek is regarded as the founder of a course on the history of orchestral styles. His instructional publications include Study Pieces in Instrumentation for Symphony Orchestra (1974) and Essays on the Art of Nineteenth-Century Orchestration (1979). His students included Eduard Kolmanovsky, Mikael Tariverdiev, Sergei Trubachev, Yuri Shishakov, David Tukhmanov, and Anatoly Muravlyov. In 2010, a concert and commemorative evening marking his centenary was held at the Yelena Gnesina Memorial Apartment Museum.