Zinoviy Zahranychnyi
Zinoviy Zahranychnyi (10 January 1900 – 23 June 1966) was a Ukrainian Soviet choirmaster, composer, music teacher and professor. Of Jewish descent, he was born in Korostyshiv and died in Kharkiv. He received the title Honored Artist of the Ukrainian SSR in 1957.
After military service from 1919 to 1922, Zahranychnyi graduated in 1927 from the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute, now the I. P. Kotlyarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts. He studied with S. Bohatyryov and V. Zolotaryov.
From 1927 to 1929, he was music director, conductor and composer at the Merry Proletarian Theatre. Between 1929 and 1941, he organized and led the Jewish Choral Chapel at the Kharkiv Regional Philharmonic, while also working as composer and conductor at the Gezkult Theatre. He served on the board of the Union of Composers of Ukraine from 1938 to 1940 and participated in creating the music for the anthem of the Ukrainian SSR in 1947.
From 1942 to 1965, Zahranychnyi was artistic director of the Labor Reserves amateur ensembles in Tashkent during the evacuation period and later in Kharkiv. With its choir, he took part in the 1957 World Festival of Youth and Students in Moscow. He taught at the Kharkiv Music and Drama Institute from 1929 until his death; the institution became the Kharkiv Conservatory in 1934 and the Institute of Arts in 1963. He led its Opera Studio from 1936 to 1941, chaired the choral conducting department in 1949–1950, and became a professor in 1956. His students included N. Babich, E. Konoplyova, Y. Kulyk, E. Miroshnychenko, A. Petrosyan and V. Ovod.
His works include the operettas The Sign of Zorro (1926), Blue Cliffs (1937), The Daring Girl (1940–1941), and My Guardsman, written with D. Klebanov in 1943. He also composed a quintet on Jewish themes (1927), a suite on Korean revolutionary songs (1936), and the musical comedy Happy Start (1950). His output further included choruses to texts by Taras Shevchenko, Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Muratov, Sholem Aleichem and Sergei Yesenin, mass songs, theatre music, and choral arrangements of folk songs. He worked with Ukrainian and Jewish folklore.