Leonid Polovinkin was a Soviet composer and conductor. He was born on 13 August 1894 in Kurgan, Tobolsk Governorate. His father, Alexei Polovinkin, was an engineer involved in railway construction, while his mother, Anna Polovinkina, came from an Old Believer merchant family.
Polovinkin studied violin and piano as a child and wrote his first works, small piano pieces, in 1906. He composed his first substantial work, a waltz, in 1912; it was published in 1927. He attended Polivanov Gymnasium and was active in its theatre group. After graduating in 1913, he entered the law faculty of Moscow University, completing his degree in 1918.
Alongside his university studies, he attended the Moscow Conservatory from 1914, studying piano with Leonid Conus and Konstantin Kipp. He later studied harmony with Vasily Zolotaryov, counterpoint with Reinhold Gliere, musical form with Georgy Catoire, composition with Sergei Vasilenko, and conducting with Nikolai Malko. He graduated from the conservatory in 1924. In the 1920s he was among the leaders of early Soviet urbanist modernism, represented by such works as the seven-piece piano cycle Incidents (1920–1925) and the foxtrot Electrificat (1925). From 1924 he served as secretary of the Association for Contemporary Music.
Polovinkin taught at the Alexander Scriabin Music Technical School in Moscow from 1922 to 1924 and taught orchestration at the Moscow Conservatory from 1926 to 1932. He was musical director and conductor at the State Drama Theatre in Leningrad from 1924 to 1926, then held the same posts at the Moscow Children’s Theatre from 1926 to 1937. In 1931 he conducted productions of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. In 1947–1948, he was musical director and conductor of the Mossovet Theatre.
His output included the operas Churilo Plenkovich, left unfinished in 1924, Hero (1933), and The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (1935), after Alexander Pushkin. He also wrote ballets, operettas, orchestral works, nine symphonies composed between 1929 and 1944, four string quartets, piano sonatas, and music for films and theatrical productions. His film scores included The Samoyed Boy, The Golden Key, Marionettes, Vasilisa the Beautiful, and The Humpbacked Horse. In 1947 he received first prize at the World Festival of Popular Science Films for the music to The Sunny Tribe, also known as The Bee People.
With Dmitry Kabalevsky and Lev Mazel, Polovinkin prepared for publication the first part, “Metrics,” of Georgy Catoire’s unfinished study Musical Form, issued in Moscow in 1934. He lived in the composers’ building on Miusskaya Square in Moscow. He died suddenly in Moscow on 8 February 1949 while on his way to the theatre and was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery.