Georgy Dmitriev
Georgy Dmitriev was a Soviet and Russian composer. He was born on October 29, 1942, in Krasnodar, in the Soviet Union, and died on July 15, 2016, in Moscow, Russia. He was a prizewinner of international composition competitions in Budapest in 1988 and Trento in 1991, received the Moscow Government Prize in 2001, was awarded the Golden Pushkin Medal in 2000, and was named an Honored Artist of Russia in 2003.
He was born into the family of a military doctor. From the age of six he studied piano, and his first attempts at composition also date from that time. From 1958 to 1961 he studied at the Krasnodar Music College in piano, music theory, and composition. On the recommendation of Dmitri Shostakovich, he entered the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory in 1961 as a composition student in the class of Professor Dmitry Kabalevsky. After graduating from the conservatory in 1966, he continued his musical education in postgraduate study and completed it with distinction in 1968. From 1969 he was a member of the Union of Soviet Composers.
Alongside his composing career, Dmitriev was active in teaching and scholarship from 1969 to 1983. He taught composition, orchestration, and polyphony at the Gnesin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute, and also taught composition at the Central School attached to the Moscow Conservatory. In 1973 he published the first edition of his book Percussion Instruments: Interpretation and the Contemporary State, described as the first Russian-language monograph on the subject. In 1981 he published the research book On the Dramatic Expressiveness of Orchestral Writing.
The annual music festival Moscow Autumn, founded in 1979, created opportunities for performances of a number of Dmitriev's large-scale works in symphonic, oratorio, chamber-instrumental, and choral genres, helping to establish his high professional reputation. In 1986 he was elected deputy chairman of the board of the Moscow organization of the Union of Composers of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. In 1988, in the first democratic elections, he was elected its chairman, and in 1989 he founded the Moscow Union of Composers with independent creative and economic status.
Dmitriev's name was associated during those years with the organization of a series of new music festivals, the first concerts of previously banned Orthodox choral music, performances of works by repressed composers such as Nikolai Roslavets, performances of works by contemporary Western composers including Xenakis, Stockhausen, and Berio, and the establishment of the Association for Contemporary Music and the Association for Electronic Music. In 1989-1991 he also served as secretary of the board and first deputy chairman of the Union of Composers of the USSR, where he reformed copyright, socio-economic, and international programs. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he was elected in 1992 as chairman of the International Association of Composers' Organizations of the CIS countries.
From 1993 he was chairman of the Russian Musical Society, a public association engaged in independent creative, concert, and publishing activity. From 1994 he resumed teaching, leading a composition class at the Russian Academy of Choral Art. The article also notes his public position in March 2014, when he supported the annexation of Crimea and signed a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin in support of it. He died in 2016 and was buried in Zvenigorod at Zvenigorod Cemetery.
Dmitriev's creative output covered a wide range of genres, from children's piano miniatures to large-scale symphonic canvases. A special place in his musical legacy was occupied by sacred, specifically Orthodox, themes. The article emphasizes that literary and poetic text was also an important component of his work, drawing on chronicles, myths, canonical texts, saints' lives, folk songs, historical documents, prose, and poetry. His music is described as conceptually sharp and as striving to make music itself speak.
Among his principal works were the stage compositions Beloved and Lost and Saint Hermogenes; the oratorios From The Tale of Bygone Years and Cosmic Russia; orchestral works including three symphonies, Kyiv, the Violin Concerto, Sibyl, Icon, and Episodes in the Character of a Fresco; chamber works such as three string quartets, sonatas, Percussionata, and Warsaw Fantasy; numerous vocal and choral compositions including Vespers, Stabat Mater Dolorosa, Old Russian Legends, Symphony of Faces, and Vladimir Mother of God. He also composed music for many films from the 1970s through the early 1990s and left an extensive discography devoted to his orchestral, chamber, vocal, and choral music.
Connections
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