Mikhail Yefimovich Kroshner, also identified as Moisey Khaimovich Kroshner, was a Soviet composer born in Kyiv in 1900. From 1918 to 1921, he studied piano at the Kyiv Conservatory with Vladimir Pukhalsky and Felix Blumenfeld. He then worked with concert organizations and theaters in Kyiv and Moscow until 1931.
Kroshner studied composition with Vasily Zolotaryov at the Sverdlovsk Conservatory. He followed Zolotaryov to Minsk in 1932 and graduated from the Belarusian Conservatory in 1937, in its first graduating class in composition. From 1933 to 1938, he worked at the State Theater of Opera and Ballet of the Byelorussian SSR.
He is best known for The Nightingale, described as the first national Belarusian ballet and based on a story by Zmitrok Byadulya. The ballet was staged at the Odessa Opera and Ballet Theater in 1939 and at the Bolshoi Theater of the Byelorussian SSR, where its performance on May 11, 1939, marked the opening of the theater’s new building.
Kroshner also wrote music for the State Jewish Theater of the Byelorussian SSR production of Abram Goldfaden’s Two Simpletons (1940), the suite Belarusian Symphonic Dances (1937), a string quartet, and romances on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Mikhail Lermontov. He joined the Union of Composers of the Byelorussian SSR in 1938 and received the title Honored Artist of the Byelorussian SSR in 1940. Most of his compositions were lost. He died in Minsk on July 28, 1942.