Zlata Tkach, born Zlata Beyrikhman, was a Moldovan composer and teacher. She was the first woman in Moldova to devote herself to professional composition. She was born on May 16, 1928, in the Bessarabian village of Lozovo, and died on January 1, 2006, in Chișinău. During her career she was named Honored Artist of the Moldavian SSR in 1974, received the State Prize of Moldova in 1982, and from 1993 to 2006 served as professor at the Academy of Music, Theatre and Fine Arts.
She was born into a Jewish family. Her father, Moisey Beyrikhman, taught violin and wind instruments at the Chișinău conservatory Național and had graduated from the Chișinău conservatory Unirea. Before she was two years old, the family returned to Chișinău to live near her mother's parents. She studied at a Romanian primary school for girls and at the Romanian Regina Maria Gymnasium in Chișinău; after the arrival of Soviet rule in 1940, she transferred to a Russian school. She also studied violin under her father's guidance, including at the music school in his violin class.
During the Second World War she was evacuated with her mother to Central Asia, but became separated from her on the way and reached Namangan in Uzbekistan alone. There she suffered from epidemic typhus and typhoid fever, was placed in an orphanage evacuated from Drohobych, and continued her schooling. At that time she wrote her first song, "Red Navy Sailors." In 1943 she was reunited with her family, and after the liberation of the city she returned to Chișinău.
In 1945 she studied at the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Chișinău University, but left before graduating and entered the musicology department of the Chișinău Conservatory, from which she graduated in 1952. She studied composition with L. S. Gurov and violin with I. L. Dailis. From 1952 to 1962 she taught at a music school and at the Ștefan Neaga Music College in Chișinău. In 1957 she resumed her studies at the conservatory in composition; after completing them in 1962, she remained there as a teacher and worked at the conservatory for the rest of her life, becoming associate professor in 1986 and professor of composition in 1993.
Tkach's output was marked by wide generic variety. She wrote concertos and sonatas for various instruments, string quartets, suites, vocal, choral and instrumental cycles, cantatas and poems, operas for small and large stages, a ballet, vocal-choreographic poems, instrumental miniatures, music for dramatic theatre and film, and songs for children.
Her principal works include the symphony "Panopticum"; the fairy-tale operas "The Goat with Three Kids" (1966, later revised, with the third version titled "The Deceitful Wolf" in 1983), "Lazybones," "The Seven-Colored Flower," "The Cook and the Boyar," and "The Little Prince"; the chamber operas "Pigeons on Slanting Lines" (1974), "Step into Immortality" (1985), and "My Parisian Uncle" after the novel by Aureliu Busuioc (1987); the ballet "Andriesh" after works by Emilian Bukov (1979); a sonata in memory of Dmitri Shostakovich for viola and piano; a concerto for flute and symphony orchestra (1989); a piano concerto with symphony orchestra (2002); the vocal cycles "Songs from the Fascist Hell" and "From Moldovan Poetry" (1984, orchestral version 1986); orchestral works including "Burlesque," "Children's Suite," a concerto for violin, strings and timpani, and the sinfonietta "Meditation"; and cantatas such as "Song of the Dniester," "City. Sun. Children.," and "Plai de cânt, plai de dor." She also wrote children's songs to verses by Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, and others.
She composed a number of popular songs in Russian and Moldovan, among them "Moldovan Houses" and "The Bird Has Flown Away" to poems by Grigore Vieru, and "I Would Write Music" to words by Robert Rozhdestvensky. Her popular songs were performed by Nadezhda Chepraga. Tkach also wrote music for several animated films produced by the Moldova-Film studio. A number of her piano works were first performed by the Moldovan pianist Gita Strakhilevich.
In the last years of her life she wrote a series of works on Jewish themes. These included the requiem-poem "Yad va-Shem," with words in Yiddish and Hebrew, and a sonata-impromptu for piano dedicated to the memory of Holocaust victims; "Four Miniatures from Jewish Folklore" for string quartet; the monoopera "Speak to Me, Mother" after Paulina Anchel's story "Asenka"; and Yiddish songs on texts by Jewish poets including Iosif Kerler, Moyshe Lemster, Shike Driz, Lyuba Wasserman, Paulina Anchel, Lev Berinsky, Leyb Kvitko, and Ikhil Shraibman.