Yevgeny Svetlanov
Yevgeny Svetlanov was a Soviet and Russian conductor, composer, pianist, and publicist. He was born on September 6, 1928, in Moscow. He studied piano at the Gnessin Music College from 1944 to 1946 and then at the Gnessin Music and Pedagogical Institute under M. A. Gurvich, later studying composition with M. F. Gnesin. While still a student, he began his artistic career as a pianist. After graduating in piano in 1951, he entered the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied opera and symphonic conducting with Aleksandr Gauk and composition with Yuri Shaporin.
In 1954, while a fourth-year conservatory student, Svetlanov became assistant conductor of the USSR All-Union Radio and Central Television Large Symphony Orchestra. From 1955 he worked as a conductor at the Bolshoi Theatre, and from 1963 to 1965 he was its chief conductor. He made his debut there in 1955 with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's opera The Maid of Pskov, which, forty-five years later, also became his final work in the theatre. In 1962 he was appointed musical director of the Kremlin Palace of Congresses, which at that time served as the Bolshoi Theatre's second stage.
From 1965 to 2000, Svetlanov was artistic director and chief conductor of the USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra, later the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra. From 1992 to 2000 he was also chief conductor of the Residentie Orchestra in The Hague. In 2000 he returned to the Bolshoi Theatre, where he worked until 2002. At the Bolshoi he conducted productions of Russian and foreign operas including Ivan Susanin, Prince Igor, Boris Godunov, Faust, Rigoletto, Eugene Onegin, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh and the Maiden Fevroniya, The Tale of Tsar Saltan, The Golden Cockerel, and Rodion Shchedrin's Not Only Love.
His conducting art won recognition not only in the Soviet Union but abroad as well. He was repeatedly invited to conduct leading foreign orchestras and to direct opera and ballet productions, including Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker at Covent Garden in London. In 1964 he conducted performances by the Bolshoi Theatre company at La Scala in Milan. He also appeared with many major ensembles in Europe, the United States, and Japan, among them the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and the NHK Symphony Orchestra.
With the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under his direction performed many leading Soviet and foreign soloists. He led premieres of numerous symphonic works by Soviet composers, and Soviet first performances of Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher, Olivier Messiaen's Turangalîla, Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony, and works by Igor Stravinsky, Béla Bartók, Anton Webern, and Heitor Villa-Lobos. Between 1980 and 1983 he presented the concert cycle Selected Masterpieces of Western European Music. His recorded legacy was enormous, comprising thousands of tapes, discs, and live recordings. He was the first conductor to realize the idea of an Anthology of Russian Symphonic Music, and with his orchestra he recorded almost all the symphonic works of Glinka, Dargomyzhsky, Rubinstein, Borodin, Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Taneyev, Lyapunov, Arensky, Glazunov, Kalinnikov, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, and Myaskovsky, as well as music by Wagner, Brahms, Mahler, Stravinsky, Khachaturian, Shostakovich, Khrennikov, and others. He was especially renowned for his interpretations of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff, and he also left a number of recordings as a pianist.
As a composer, Svetlanov wrote original works including a Symphony in B minor, the symphonic poems Daugava and Kalina Krasnaya, a Poem for violin and orchestra in memory of David Oistrakh, an Aria for cello ensemble, piano music, romances, and other pieces. The article notes that his style as a composer echoed the творчество of Sergei Rachmaninoff. He also spoke and wrote frequently on musical life in the press, on radio, and on television; more than 150 of his articles, essays, and reviews were republished in the collection Music Today in 1976. From 1974 he served as secretary of the board of the Union of Soviet Composers.
In 2000 he was dismissed from the post of chief conductor of the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra by the Minister of Culture. Svetlanov died on May 3, 2002, in Moscow, at the age of seventy-three, and was buried at Vagankovo Cemetery. In later years his name was commemorated widely: in 2006 the Russian State Academic Symphony Orchestra was named after him, the main hall of the Moscow International House of Music bears his name, a minor planet was named in his honor, and since 2007 an international conducting competition named after Yevgeny Svetlanov has been held.