Georgy Sviridov
Georgy Sviridov was a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist who also wrote music for films. He was born in Fatezh on December 16, 1915, and died in Moscow on January 6, 1998.
He began piano lessons at nine and soon took up the balalaika, joining a local folk-instrument ensemble. From 1929 to 1932 he studied at a music school in Kursk. In 1932 he moved to Leningrad, where he studied piano and composition at the Central Music Technical School, graduating in 1936. He continued his composition studies at the Leningrad Conservatory with Pyotr Ryazanov and Dmitri Shostakovich.
Sviridov first gained notice with a 1935 cycle of romances setting poems by Alexander Pushkin. His early works included a piano concerto, a symphony and chamber music. From the mid-1950s he developed a distinctive style that drew on Russian folk and choral traditions. His music also built on the work of Russian classical composers, especially Modest Mussorgsky, while incorporating elements of twentieth-century music.
His output included symphonies, concertos, oratorios, cantatas, choral works, songs and romances. Among his best-known works are Kursk Songs, which helped establish the movement later called the “New Folk Wave”; the cantata Snow Is Falling; and Musical Illustrations to Pushkin’s Story “The Snowstorm”. His suite Time, Forward! became widely known, and its music was used as the opening theme for a television news program. He also composed scores for films, including The Snowstorm and Time, Forward!.
Sviridov received the Lenin Prize for his Pathetic Oratorio, as well as the Stalin Prize, two State Prizes of the USSR and the State Prize of the Russian Federation. He was named a People’s Artist of the USSR and a Hero of Socialist Labor.