Nikolai Kapustin
Nikolai Kapustin was a Soviet and Russian composer and pianist. Born on 22 November 1937 in Nikitovka, now part of Gorlovka, he became known for music that united jazz harmony, rhythm, melodic gestures, and piano writing with the forms and compositional principles of classical music. Although his music can sound improvisatory, it was fully composed and notated.
Kapustin's father worked at a meat-processing plant, while his mother was a typist who played the piano and encouraged his musical interests. Evacuated with his mother, sister, and grandmother to Tokmak in the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic during the summer of 1941, he returned to Nikitovka in 1943. He began piano lessons with Pyotr Vinnichenko and, from 1949, travelled weekly to Artemivsk to study with pianist Lyubov Frantsuzova. In 1950 he wrote his first work, a piano sonata, despite having had no systematic composition training.
In 1952 he entered the Music College attached to the Moscow Conservatory, studying with Aurelian Rubbakh, who supported his interests in composition and jazz. After graduating in 1956, Kapustin entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied piano with Alexander Goldenweiser and completed his course in 1961. While his formal studies concentrated on the classical piano repertoire, he pursued jazz and composition independently, learning and performing American jazz works by ear.
At the Sixth World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow in July 1957, Kapustin performed his Concertino for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 1, with Yuri Saulsky's jazz orchestra. Later that year he formed a jazz quintet that performed for several months at Moscow's National Hotel. From 1961 to 1972 he was pianist, arranger, and composer with Oleg Lundstrem's orchestra, touring throughout the Soviet Union and abroad. Works associated with this ensemble included Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 2, Variations for Piano and Big Band, Op. 3, and Toccata for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 8.
In 1972 Kapustin joined the Central Television and All-Union Radio concert and variety orchestra, the Blue Screen, directed by Boris Karamyshev. There he again worked as pianist, composer, and arranger, writing such larger-scale works as Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 14, Concert Rhapsody, Op. 25, and Suite in an Old Style, Op. 28. After that orchestra was disbanded in 1977, he became chiefly a studio pianist with the State Symphony Orchestra of Cinematography. In 1980 he gave his last public concert as a soloist, performing his Second Piano Concerto at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, though he later occasionally played chamber music.
Kapustin left the cinematography orchestra in 1984 to work as a freelance composer. This change coincided with the Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 39, and Eight Concert Etudes, Op. 40. From the mid-1980s, Melodiya issued recordings of his piano music performed by the composer himself. He subsequently concentrated mainly on solo piano and chamber music. Pianist Nikolai Petrov gave the first performance of Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 54, in Moscow in 1991, while Kapustin performed chamber works with cellist Alexander Zagorinsky in Russia and Germany during 1998 and 1999.
International performances and reissues of his recordings expanded the audience for his music in the 2000s. In 2000 he attended the Western premiere of his Second Piano Sonata in London, performed by Marc-André Hamelin; afterward he wrote Piano Sonata No. 11, Op. 101, titled Twickenham after the London district where he had stayed. His works were published by the Japanese firm Prhythm from 2003 to 2013 and by Schott Music from 2014. He continued composing until the mid-2010s, with his final five numbered works, Opp. 157-161, dating from 2015. His output includes twenty piano sonatas, six piano concertos, the cycle Twenty-Four Preludes and Fugues, and extensive chamber and orchestral music. Kapustin died in Moscow on 2 July 2020.
His piano music occupies the central position in his legacy, encompassing sonatas, preludes, preludes and fugues, concert etudes, variations, bagatelles, sonatinas, and programmatic miniatures. The sonatas retain traditional thematic development while employing jazz-derived harmony, rhythm, and texture. His orchestral works include concertos for piano, saxophone, double bass, cello, and violin, while his chamber music includes sonatas with piano, two string quartets, a piano quintet, trios, and mixed ensembles. His recordings, largely devoted to his own works, were first issued on Melodiya discs in 1986 and 1989 and later released by labels including Boheme Music, Triton, and Octavia Records.