Gennady Rozhdestvensky

Gennady Rozhdestvensky

b. 1931 (Moscow) · d. 2018 (Moscow)

Gennady Rozhdestvensky (4 May 1931 – 16 June 2018) was a Soviet and Russian conductor, pianist, composer, teacher, and musical public figure. Born in Moscow to the conductor Nikolai Anosov and the singer Natalya Rozhdestvenskaya, he became one of the leading conductors of his generation, with a career spanning more than six decades.

He studied at the Gnessin Music School with Elena Gnessina and at the Central Music School of the Moscow Conservatory, where he trained as a pianist. In 1949 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying piano with Lev Oborin and opera and symphonic conducting with his father. He graduated in 1954 and completed postgraduate study in 1957. His conducting debut came in 1951 at the Bolshoi Theatre, with Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty.

Rozhdestvensky held leading posts with major Soviet, Russian, and international ensembles. He served the Bolshoi Theatre Symphony Orchestra in several capacities, including assistant chief conductor, ballet conductor, chief conductor, and opera conductor. He was chief conductor and artistic director of the Grand Symphony Orchestra of All-Union Radio and Central Television from 1961 to 1974; musical director of the Moscow Chamber Musical Theatre Orchestra from 1974 to 1985; chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra from 1978 to 1981; and chief conductor of the Vienna Symphony Orchestra from 1980 to 1982. He also led the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra from 1981 to 1992, returned as chief conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra from 1991 to 1995, and was chief conductor and general artistic director of the Bolshoi Theatre in the 2000–01 season.

From 2011 he worked as a guest conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra. He also appeared with the Berlin Philharmonic, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and symphony orchestras in London, Chicago, Cleveland, Tokyo, and elsewhere; he was honorary conductor of Tokyo's Yomiuri Orchestra. From September 2012, he was musical director of the Boris Pokrovsky Moscow State Academic Chamber Musical Theatre.

At the Bolshoi Theatre, he conducted about forty operas and ballets, including premieres of Rodion Shchedrin's The Little Humpbacked Horse and Carmen Suite, Aram Khachaturian's Spartacus, and the first version of Prokofiev's opera The Gambler. His repertory also included works by Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Poulenc, Hindemith, Orff, Stravinsky, Britten, Myaskovsky, Sviridov, Shebalin, and Schnittke. He conducted the first Soviet performances of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring and Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and gave the premiere of Schnittke's First Symphony in Gorky in 1974.

A tireless advocate of both contemporary and neglected music, Rozhdestvensky gave more than 300 works their first performances in Russia and more than 150 their world premieres. In later years he conducted works including Dohnányi's Second Symphony, Martinů's oratorio Gilgamesh, Janáček's The Makropulos Affair, Zemlinsky's Lyric Symphony, Wagner's The Flying Dutchman, Dvořák's Stabat Mater, and Vieru's Sixth Symphony, which was dedicated to him. In 2004 he gave first Russian performances of several Beethoven cantatas.

As a composer, he wrote several works, best known for the oratorio A Sacred Word to the Russian People, to words by Aleksey Remizov. He also created the orchestral suite Pushkiniana (1961) from Prokofiev's music for productions of Eugene Onegin and Boris Godunov and for the film The Queen of Spades. A committed teacher, he taught opera and symphonic conducting at the Moscow Conservatory from 1974, became a professor in 1976, and chaired the department from 2001.

Rozhdestvensky wrote six books on music and conducting, published between 1974 and 2023. His discography comprises more than 800 discs and records, including cycles of symphonies by Bruckner, Glazunov, Prokofiev, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Shostakovich. He received the Lenin Prize in 1970 and the State Prize of the Russian Federation for 1995. He died in Moscow after a prolonged illness in 2018 and was buried at Vvedenskoye Cemetery.

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