Valery Rutter

Valery Rutter was a Soviet and Kazakh musical figure, conductor, and professor. He was born in Kharkiv on January 21, 1924, and died in Leipzig on September 25, 2010. He was named an Honored Arts Worker of the Kazakh SSR and the Bashkir ASSR.

From 1933, Rutter studied violin at the music school attached to the Kharkiv Conservatory. He later studied at the Leningrad Conservatory, first at its naval faculty and then in theoretical and composition studies with Alexander Dolzhansky and conducting with Sergei Yeltsin. He graduated with distinction and also trained as a musicologist and as an opera and symphony conductor.

From 1948 to 1953, he was artistic director of the Northern Fleet Ensemble. He subsequently worked at opera theaters in Chelyabinsk, Frunze (now Bishkek), Ufa, Sverdlovsk, and other cities. From 1973 to 1997, he was chief conductor of the Kazakh State Academic Abai Opera and Ballet Theater in Almaty. His repertoire included 58 operas and 30 ballets. He conducted premieres of works including Yevgeny Rakhmadiyev’s Alpamys, Georgy Zhubanova’s Karagoz, and Tolegen Mynbayev’s Frescoes, as well as the first staged Soviet production of Arthur Honegger’s Joan of Arc at the Stake.

Rutter also wrote several dozen songs to poems by Heinrich Heine in 1941–42, including the cycle Lyric Intermezzo for high voice and orchestra. His other work included arrangements of music by Dmitri Shostakovich, orchestration of five of Shostakovich’s preludes, and writing on Shostakovich’s harmony and the folk-song elements in his themes. He also published articles and interview texts in newspapers and journals.

Organizations

• Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts
• Saint Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov State Conservatory
• Abai Kazakh National Opera and Ballet Theatre
• Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre
• Bashkir State Opera and Ballet Theatre
• Kyrgyz National Academic Opera and Ballet Theater
• Alexander Spendiaryan National Academic Opera and Ballet Theatre