Rodion Shchedrin

The Carmen Suite of 1967 is the score that travels furthest under his name: Bizet taken apart and rebuilt for strings and percussion alone, made for Maya Plisetskaya to dance. It is a fair introduction to Shchedrin — theatrical, ironic, technically dazzling and quite unembarrassed about the tradition it plunders. Born in Moscow in 1932, he passed through the Moscow Choral School and then the Conservatory, taking degrees in both piano and composition and studying composition with Yuri Shaporin; for decades he was a formidable pianist in his own works. The catalogue is large and unusually even across genres: five concertos for orchestra, six piano concertos, symphonies, chamber and choral music, and a piano output performers still mine. Russian literature gave him his operas and ballets — Dead Souls, Lolita, The Enchanted Wanderer, Anna Karenina, The Seagull, The Lady with the Lapdog — and the settings are readings of their books, not illustrations of them. He taught at the Moscow Conservatory between 1965 and 1969 and headed the composers' union of the Russian federation from 1973. From the 1990s he lived largely in Germany, and he died in Munich in 2025. He read piano with Yakov Flier, and was married to Maya Plisetskaya from 1958 until her death in 2015. The first of the concertos for orchestra, the chastushka piece known in English as Naughty Limericks, was the work that made his name abroad, while the second, Zvony, was commissioned for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic and first played by them under Leonard Bernstein. He held the USSR State Prize of 1972, the Lenin Prize of 1984 and the State Prize of the Russian Federation, handed him by Boris Yeltsin in 1992, and joined the Berlin Academy of Arts in 1989.