Aram Khachaturian

Late to formal training, Aram Khachaturian began formal cello studies in Moscow at nineteen at the Gnessin Institute and went on to the Conservatory, where Nikolai Myaskovsky took him for composition. He had grown up in Tiflis, in an Armenian family, among the folk and urban music of the Caucasus, and that mixture stayed in his melodic shapes and his motoric rhythm. The three concertos, for piano, violin and cello, and the ballets Gayane and Spartacus are among his works; the ballets include the Sabre Dance and the Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia. In 1948 he was censured for formalism together with Shostakovich and Prokofiev, and subsequently resumed institutional teaching. From 1950 he taught at the Gnessin Institute and the Moscow Conservatory and died in Moscow in 1978. Gayane was preceded by the ballet Happiness and commissioned by the Kirov Theatre in Leningrad; he drew on authentic Armenian song material at Maxim Gorky's suggestion, Nina Anisimova made the choreography, and he finished the score in a cold hotel room in Perm in 1942. He served as secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, was an honorary member of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and received the Lenin Prize, the USSR State Prize five times and the titles Hero of Socialist Labour and People's Artist of the USSR. The hall of the Yerevan Philharmonic carries his name.