Nikolai Anosov
Nikolai Pavlovich Anosov was a Soviet conductor, teacher, historian, and theorist of conducting. He was born in Borisoglebsk on 17 February 1900 and died in Moscow on 2 December 1962. He was honored as a Merited Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1951.
Anosov was born into the family of Pavel Anosov, a manager of a branch of the Volga-Kama Bank, and Varvara Muralova. He began studying music at the age of four. In the 1920s he took composition lessons from Anatoly Alexandrov, but completed his formal musical education only in 1943, when he graduated externally from the composition faculty of the Moscow Conservatory. In 1919 he volunteered for the Red Army, and in 1921 took part in the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion.
He made his conducting debut in 1930 on All-Union Radio, conducting a radio production of Gluck's opera Orpheus, and worked in its opera division until 1938. He began his concert career as chief conductor of the orchestra of the Rostov Philharmonic from 1938 to 1939 and of the Baku Philharmonic from 1939 to 1940. During those years he also taught at the Azerbaijan Conservatory.
From 1940 until the end of his life, Anosov taught opera and symphonic conducting at the Moscow Conservatory. From 1949 to 1956 he headed the department of opera and symphonic conducting, and from 1951 he was a professor. His students included his son Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Veronika Dudarova, and Algis Zhuraitis. During the Great Patriotic War he led the Frontline Musical Theater of the All-Russian Theatrical Society.
From 1948 to 1951 he was chief conductor of the Symphony Orchestra of the Moscow Regional Philharmonic, now the Moscow State Academic Symphony Orchestra. In the 1950s he conducted the leading Soviet orchestras and toured in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, China, Belgium, Italy, and Great Britain, among other countries.
Anosov conducted a large number of works and quickly mastered the particular features of any score. He actively promoted twentieth-century foreign music and Russian music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1931 he conducted the premiere of Mussorgsky's opera Marriage in the edition prepared by Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov. His concert programs were marked by broad stylistic variety; for example, his concerts of American music in 1944 included the premiere of Roy Harris's Fifth Symphony.
He also worked on the history of conducting and on the foundations of conducting technique. In teaching he introduced the concept of "conducting fingering," the choice of a particular beat unit in conducting according to the interpretation of the metric idea, a concept relevant not only to symphonic conductors but also to opera and choral conductors. He wrote A Practical Guide to Reading Symphonic Scores in 1951, which included valuable recommendations on deciphering figured bass. He spoke German fluently and could read English and French. He translated into Russian books by Henry Wood and Charles Munch, as well as articles by Igor Markevitch and I. P. Tillmann.
A large part of Anosov's audio recordings remained unpublished and were kept in the archive of State Television and Radio. Published recordings include works by Arensky, Balakirev, Bartok, Bizet, Glazunov, Grieg, Dvorak, Kabalevsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, and Shchedrin. He was buried at Novodevichy Cemetery in Moscow.
Connections
This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.