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First Name

 Dmitri

Middle Name

 Borisovich

Last Name

 Kabalevsky

Birth Year

 1904

Death Year

 1987

Biography

 Russian composer. He was destined for a career in mathematics and economics, but a flair for the arts encouraged him to devote himself to learning the piano. He also studied composition with Catoire and Myaskovsky at the Moscow Conservatory (1925–9), and from about that time began to produce his earliest important works, including the First Piano Concerto (1928), First String Quartet (1928), Three Blok Poems (1927), and First Piano Sonatina (1930); this last heralded an important facet of Kabalevsky's later writing, his music for young people, which included much piano music and a series of concertos for violin (1948), cello (1948–9), and piano (his Third Piano Concerto, 1952). He also became active as a writer on music from 1927 (a collection of his articles was published in Moscow in 1963), and was a key figure in the Union of Soviet Composers, established in 1932. During the 1930s Kabalevsky wrote his Second Piano Concerto (1936)—perhaps the most striking and invigorating of the three—and launched into writing for the theatre, both incidental music and opera. His first opera was the three-act Colas Breugnon (Leningrad, 1938), in which his gifts for lyrical melody, transparent orchestration, and vivid choral writing combined to make an effective stage piece, though it attracted criticism (primarily for certain aspects of the libretto) and Kabalevsky revised the score for its revival in 1971. A poor libretto dogged his next opera, V ogne (‘Into the Fire’; Moscow, 1943), and Kabalevsky eventually withdrew it, incorporating some of the music into Sem'ya Tarasa (‘The Family of Taras’; Leningrad, 1947, rev. 1950 and 1967). He composed one other opera, Nikita Vershinin (Moscow, 1955), and two lightweight operettas, Vesna poyot (‘Spring Sings’; Moscow, 1957) and Syostrï (‘Sisters’; Perm', 1967). In his later years Kabalevsky devoted much attention to choral works and solo songs, though he continued to contribute to the instrumental repertory such works as the deeply felt, but tough and cogent Cello Sonata (1962). Geoffrey Norris Kabalevsky