Tikhon Khrennikov

Guitar, mandolin and piano came before any formal training for Tikhon Khrennikov, the youngest of a large family in the provincial town of Yelets. He studied with Mikhail Gnessin from 1929 and then at the Moscow Conservatory with Vissarion Shebalin, taking piano with Heinrich Neuhaus; the First Piano Concerto, written when he was nineteen, and the First Symphony that followed established him as a composer of direct, lyrical, rhythmically springy music that players enjoyed and audiences picked up quickly. Three symphonies, four piano concertos, concertos for violin and for cello, operas, operettas, ballets, chamber music and songs followed, together with a large body of theatre and film music — the score for the 1941 film Swineherd and Shepherd was among the most widely heard music in the country. He was music director of the Central Theatre of the Red Army from 1941 to 1966 and headed the Union of Soviet Composers from 1948 to 1991. For twenty-five years he chaired the jury of the Tchaikovsky Competition. He died in Moscow in 2007, aged ninety-four; the house in Yelets where he was born is now a museum. He was the youngest of ten children in a family of horse traders, sang in a choir and played in a local orchestra in Yelets before moving to Moscow as a teenager; at the Gnessin college between 1929 and 1932 he worked with Yefraim Gelman as well as Gnessin, and the First Symphony, his Conservatory graduation piece, reached Leopold Stokowski. Songs and serenades written for a Vakhtangov Theatre production of Much Ado About Nothing in 1936 made his name, and the Song of Moscow from the 1941 film brought him a Stalin Prize. Andrei Zhdanov put him forward for the composers' union post in 1948.