Sergei Slonimsky

Sergey Mikhaylovich Slonimsky
(b Leningrad, 12 Aug 1932). Russian composer, pianist and teacher. The son of the writer M.L.

Slonimsky and a relative of the composer and musicologist Nicholas Slonimsky, he began to study composition at the age of 11, with Shebalin. From 1945 to 1950 he attended a special music school for gifted children, where he was taught the piano by S. Savshinsky and composition by Arapov and Vol'fenzon. In 1955 he graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in Yevlakhov’s composition class, and in 1956 in V. Nil'sen’s piano class. In 1958 he completed a postgraduate course on the theory of music, instructed by Ter-Martirosian. Since 1959 he taught music-theoretical disciplines, and since 1967 composition, at the Leningrad Conservatory. He has taken part more than once in folkloristic expeditions, and has recorded Russian folksongs. He is a Candidate of Arts (1963, for his dissertation on Prokofiev’s symphonies), professor (1976), laureate of the State M. Glinka Prize (1983) and People’s Artist of Russia (1987). He runs musical gatherings devoted to the popularization of Russian 20th-century music (especially from the 1920s). He is a member of the Composers’ Union.

Slonimsky belongs to the generation who came into being as composers after World War II. Since the middle of the 1950s he has been interested in the musical avant garde and in a decisive stylistic renewal. Among his first works, which attracted attention by their use of non-traditional media, were the Karneval'naya uvertyura (‘Carnival Overture’, 1957) and the F minor Symphony (1958). Not uninfluenced by Stravinsky’s folklorism, he became one of the pioneers of the ‘new folklore wave’ at the beginning of the 1960s, with his vocal cycle Pesni vol'nitsï (‘Songs of the Runaway Serfs’, 1960) and his opera Virineya (1967). He subsequently gravitated more towards archaic folk materials, towards medieval music and also the avant garde; these apparently contradictory tendencies may be seen in various compositions, both in parallel and separately (Kontsert-buff (‘Concerto-Buffo’, 1964–5) the cantata Golos iz khora (‘A Voice from the Choir’, 1964) and others).