Gennady Provatorov

Gennady Provatorov was a Soviet and Belarusian conductor. He was born on March 11, 1929, in Moscow, USSR, and died on May 4, 2010, in Minsk, Belarus. He was honored as People's Artist of the RSFSR in 1981, Honored Artist of the Republic of Belarus, and laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Belarus in 1996.

His mother was a nurse, and from her he learned about his father, who had been arrested at the age of twenty-nine. His father played the violin, was an actor, director, and author of satirical and comic plays, and died at the beginning of the Stalinist repressions. Provatorov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory as a pianist in the class of Alexander Goldenweiser in 1952, and then as a conductor under Kirill Kondrashin and Alexander Gauk in 1956.

From 1955 to 1961 he was a conductor of the symphony orchestras of the Moscow Regional, Kharkiv, and Dnipropetrovsk philharmonic societies. From 1961 to 1965 he worked at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Musical Theatre. In 1962 he conducted the premiere of the second version of Dmitri Shostakovich's opera Katerina Izmailova, and later recorded it; the recording received the Grand Prix du Disque in France in 1966.

From 1965 to 1968 he led the orchestra of the Odesa Opera and Ballet Theatre, and from 1968 to 1971 the Leningrad Maly Opera and Ballet Theatre. Under his direction, productions there included Hector Berlioz's opera Benvenuto Cellini, presented for the first time in the USSR, Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, and Igor Stravinsky's ballets The Rite of Spring, Petrushka, and The Firebird. From 1971 to 1981 he was chief conductor of the Kuibyshev Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra.

From 1984 he lived and worked in Belarus. Between 1984 and 1989 he headed the State Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre of the Byelorussian SSR and continued to work with it in the following years. Among his productions were Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina, Sergei Prokofiev's War and Peace, Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet. He also conducted works by Belarusian composers, including the premieres of Sergei Cortes's opera The Visit of the Lady in 1995 and Andrei Mdivani's ballet Passions (Rogneda) in 1996.

Provatorov also taught a number of conductors who later worked in Belarusian musical institutions, including Igor Bukhvalov, Yevgeny Stepantsov, Pyotr Vandilovsky, Vyacheslav Volich, Ivan Kostyakhin, Mikhail Snitko, and Vladimir Ovodok. He died in Minsk after a serious illness. A funeral service was held at the Holy Spirit Cathedral in Minsk, followed by a public memorial at the Belarusian State Academy of Music. He was buried in Moscow at Shcherbinskoye Cemetery.

His recordings included Tchaikovsky's opera The Oprichnik with the Symphony Orchestra of Central Television and All-Union Radio, symphonies no. 1 and 2 by Gavriil Popov, and the film-opera Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin, directed by Roman Tikhomirov in 1969.

Connections

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