Fuat Mansurov was a Soviet and Russian conductor and teacher. He was born into a Tatar family in Almaty on 10 January 1928. In 1950 he graduated from Kazakh State University and subsequently taught at its Faculty of Physics and Mathematics.
Mansurov completed the opera and symphonic conducting course at the Kurmangazy Alma-Ata State Conservatory in 1951, studying with Akhmet Zhubanov and Ilya Zak. He later continued his training with Leo Ginzburg at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory and undertook further study under Igor Markevitch. From 1951 he also taught at the Alma-Ata Conservatory.
From 1949 to 1952, he conducted the Kurmangazy Orchestra of Folk Instruments. He then worked at the Abai Kazakh State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre from 1953 to 1956, followed by the Kazakh Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 1957 he became a laureate of the World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow.
In 1958 Mansurov founded the State Symphony Orchestra of the Kazakh SSR and served as its principal conductor until 1962. With the orchestra, he performed in East Germany, Poland and Italy. He returned to the Kazakh Opera and Ballet Theatre in 1963, conducting productions including Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Mukan Tulebayev's Birzhan and Sara, Zhubanov and Latif Khamidi's Abai, Syzdyk Mukhamedzhanov's Aisulu, and Gaziza Zhubanova's Twenty-Eight. He was a laureate of the Second All-Union Conductors' Competition in 1966.
From 1968 he was principal conductor of the Tatar Opera and Ballet Theatre, and from 1969 he worked as a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre. His recording of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Tsar's Bride with the Bolshoi Theatre's soloists and orchestra became especially well known. At the Bolshoi, he conducted opera productions of Prokofiev's Semyon Kotko, Verdi's Rigoletto and Il trovatore, Dargomyzhsky's Rusalka, and Ravel's L'Heure espagnole, as well as ballets including Mikhail Chulaki's Russian Tale, Berlioz's Romeo and Juliet, and Kirill Molchanov's Macbeth.
In 1989 Mansurov became principal conductor and artistic director of the State Symphony Orchestra of the Republic of Tatarstan. He was a professor at the Moscow State Conservatory from 1970 and at the Kazan State Conservatory from 1986. He developed a method for training orchestral players, created exercises to prepare musicians for symphony-orchestra work, led professional-development seminars for conductors, and devised the Moscow Conservatory course “Work with Orchestral Sections.”
His honours included the titles People's Artist of the Kazakh SSR (1967), People's Artist of the Tatar ASSR (1971), and People's Artist of Russia (1998), as well as the Gabdulla Tukay State Prize of the Republic of Tatarstan in 1994. He died in Moscow on 11 June 2010 after a serious illness and was buried in the Actors' Alley of Troyekurovskoye Cemetery.