Gavriil Yudin

Gavriil Yudin was a Soviet conductor, teacher, and composer. He was born in Vitebsk on 12 June 1905. He came from a cultured family: his father, Yakov Gavriilovich Yudin, was an assistant to a sworn attorney at the Vitebsk District Court, and his mother, Polina Isaakovna Rabinovich, was a singer and a graduate of the Berlin Conservatory. His relatives also included the pianist Maria Yudina and the artist Lev Yudin.

Yudin received his first piano lessons from the pianist O. S. Gabrilovich, a distant relative on his mother’s side. In 1926 he graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied composition with P. Kalafati and conducting with N. A. Malko.

From 1924 to 1926 he worked as an assistant conductor and répétiteur at the Opera Studio of the Leningrad Conservatory, and from 1926 to 1927 at the Bolshoi Theatre Opera Studio. Between 1928 and 1933 he served as a conductor in opera theaters in Moscow, Ufa, Perm, and Samara. In 1934 and 1935 he conducted the orchestra of the Moscow Theater for Children, and later became chief conductor of the philharmonic symphony orchestras in Stalingrad, Arkhangelsk, Gorky, and Kishinev.

In 1941 to 1943 Yudin was musical director of the opera class at the Moscow State Conservatory. From 1946 to 1955 he taught conducting at the Institute of Military Conductors. Later, from 1956 to 1967, he was a consultant in the artistic department of the Moscow State Academic Philharmonic. Alongside his official posts, he remained active as a guest conductor, and in later years he served on the jury of nearly all All-Union and All-Russian conducting competitions. Even without holding a formal teaching position, he advised young conductors, among them A. V. Dashunin.

Under Yudin’s baton a number of works were performed for the first time, including suites from Tikhon Khrennikov’s Much Ado About Nothing in 1935, Sergei Prokofiev’s Summer Day in 1948, and Alexander Glazunov’s Ninth Symphony in 1948, orchestrated by Yudin from the composer’s piano sketch. He also led first performances in the Soviet Union of scenes from Richard Strauss’s Arabella in 1976 and Mozart’s La finta giardiniera in 1977. He appeared in many cities across the Soviet Union and also abroad, including Karlovy Vary in Czechoslovakia.

In 1985 Yudin marked the sixtieth anniversary of his conducting career with a concert with the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory. Part of that concert, including Dmitri Shostakovich’s Ninth Symphony, was later issued on a Melodiya record. His last conducting appearance took place in Moscow on 3 December 1988 in a program of works by Beethoven.

As a composer, Yudin wrote the opera Mutiny, based on Dmitry Furmanov and left unfinished, the musical comedy The Bedbug after Vladimir Mayakovsky, first staged in 1957 at the Pyatigorsk Operetta Theatre, the cantata Retribution to the prologue of a poem by Alexander Blok for tenor and orchestra, an overture-rhapsody on themes of Don Cossack songs, the Moldavian Suite for orchestra, as well as works for string quartet, songs, and choruses. He also published articles and memoirs on music and edited books devoted to Emil Cooper and Natan Rakhlin. He died in Moscow on 5 October 1991.