Yuri Chichkov

Yuri Mikhailovich Chichkov was a Soviet composer, People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, Honored Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, and a laureate of the USSR State Prize and the Lenin Komsomol Prize. He was born on July 26, 1929, in Moscow, where he also spent his childhood, and he died there on August 6, 1990.

He showed an interest in music from an early age and sang a great deal as a child. His first vocal teacher was his mother, to whom he later dedicated many vivid songs. She also brought him to music school, where his abilities were immediately recognized. During the Great Patriotic War, his studies continued despite the hardships of wartime, even after the music school was converted into a military hospital. In his youth he also began to think seriously about his own contribution to musical culture and wrote his first works.

In 1949, immediately after graduating from the Central Music School at the Moscow Conservatory, Chichkov was drafted into the army. His musical education did not stop during military service: he graduated from the Institute of Military Conductors in 1953 and from the Moscow Conservatory in 1959, where he studied composition with Vissarion Shebalin. After completing his military service, he devoted himself fully to composition for the next four decades.

Chichkov wrote a wide range of instrumental and vocal works. His output included operas, cantatas, a symphony, a suite for choir and symphony orchestra, concertos for piano, violin, and cello with orchestra, a sonatina for trumpet and piano, sonatas, variations, études, and ballad songs. He also created a cycle about first love consisting of thirteen songs set to poems by Sergei Yesenin, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Robert Rozhdestvensky, Andrei Voznesensky, Marina Tsvetaeva, Konstantin Vanshenkin, and others.

He was also the author of dozens of patriotic songs, working closely with lyricists such as Konstantin Ibryaev, Pyotr Sinyavsky, Mikhail Plyatskovsky, Yakov Khaletsky, Sergei Grebennikov, and Nikolai Dobronravov, as well as performers including Vladimir Troshin and Viktor Selivanov. His “Scherzo for Flute” was used in the opening of the popular music television program Morning Mail and in Oleg Popov’s famous clown act Sunbeam. He also composed music for television plays and films.

A very large part of Chichkov’s work and, as the article states, of his soul was devoted to children. He wrote a vast number of children’s songs that became classics of the children’s music genre. His songs were broadcast on All-Union Radio and Central Television, performed both by the Large Children’s Choir under Viktor Popov and by small school ensembles. Many of his songs were dedicated to school life, and pieces such as “Natashka the First-Grader,” “What Is It Made Of, What Is It Made Of...,” “Our School Country,” and “Childhood Is Me and You” became part of school celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and remained popular later in Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States.

Composer Yan Frenkel praised the melodic quality of Chichkov’s songs, noting their vivid imagery and appeal to both children and adults. Chichkov also worked in animation. His first animated project was the 1977 film Silk Brush, and he later wrote music for animated films including Soldier’s Tale, Once There Lived Saushkin, Who Will Come for the New Year?, Blank, Soldier’s Lamp, and I Don’t Want To and I Won’t.

Among his larger works were the opera-poem Road of Stars, the opera Land of Wonders, the cantatas A Man Born to Fly, Children Beside Their Fathers, We Take the Communists as Our Example, and We Are Your Faithful Successors, Komsomol, the suite Our School Country, and the suite for choir and symphony orchestra No One Is Forgotten and Nothing Is Forgotten. His best-known songs included “Childhood Is Me and You,” which won recognition at Song-82, “Native Little Song,” “Song of the Magic Flower,” “Hello, Mothers,” “Our Mothers Are the Most Beautiful,” and many other children’s and pioneer songs that secured his place in Soviet popular and children’s music.

Connections

This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.