Mikhail Glinka: Ruslan and Lyudmila, Ouverture for Piano 4-Hands

Composer(s)

Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka (b Novospasskoye, nr Yelnya, Smolensk district, 20 May/1 June 1804; d Berlin, 15 Feb 1857). Russian composer. He was the first Russian composer to combine distinction in speaking the musical idiom of the day with a personal and strongly original voice. Emerging from the background of a provincial dilettante, though with generous access to local music-making opportunties, he made himself at home in metropolitan centres and mastered the procedures of Italian and French opera, and complemented that expertise with skill in motivic and contrapuntal working as well as instrumentation. His compositions, especially the operas A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila and the orchestral fantasia Kamarinskaya, represent cornerstones of what are known as the ‘Russian classics’, and furnished models for later 19th-century composers.