This Week in Classical Music: September 21, 2020.Alexander Lokshin.Several great composers were born this week: Jean-Philippe Rameau, for example, on September 25th of 1683, or Dmitry Shostakovich, on the same day in 1906.George Gershwin was born on September 26th of 1898.Komitas, the national composer of Armenia, was also born on the 26th, in 1869, while Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who occupies a similar place in the musical history of Lithuania, was born on September 22nd of 1875.And let’s not forget Andrzej Panufnik, one of the most interesting Polish composer of the 20th century: he was born on September 24th of 1914.
We’ve written about every single one of them, but this week we’d like to compensate for a significant date we missed last week.September 19th marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Lokshin, a very talented Soviet composer whose tragic life in a way mirrors the history of his native country.Lokshin was born in Biysk, a city in Altai, southern Siberia, into a Jewish family.When Alexander was ten, the family moved to Novosibirsk, a much larger and culturally developed city, where Alexander attended a music school.In 1936 Lokshin went to Moscow and eventually was accepted at the Moscow Conservatory, the composition class of Nikolai Myaskovsky.In 1939, for his graduation, Lokshin wrote a symphonic piece with a vocal part based on Charles Baudelaire’s cycle Les Fleurs du Mal.In the 1939 Soviet Union Baudelaire was considered “bourgeois,” and even though the work was performed by the noted conductor Nikolai Anosov, Lokshin was denied a diploma and eventually kicked out of the Conservatory.But things worked unpredictably in the Soviet Union, where an official could be promoted and then executed a couple months later.In this case, Lokshin was lucky: Myaskovsky wrote a glowing letter of recommendation and in 1941, despite his troubles at the Conservatory, Lokshin was admitted to the official Composers’ Union.As the war started Lokshin volunteered to join the army but was soon dismissed because of poor health (he had terrible stomach problems).He moved back to Novosibirsk, where his family was living in poverty and his father was dying.In Novosibirsk Lokshin had several menial jobs and continued composing.In 1943 one of his works, a vocal-symphonic poem Wait for me (the words were based on a very popular poem by Konstantin Simonov), was performed by the Leningrad Symphony under the direction of Yevgeny Mravinsky, then touring Novosibirsk.The work was praised in musical circles and Lokshin was readmitted to Moscow Conservatory where Wait for me was accepted as his graduation work.In 1945 Lokshin was given a low-level job at the Conservatory, but three years later, in 1948, during Stalin’s antisemitic campaign against “Cosmopolitism” (read against the Jews), he was fired.Even though Myaskovsky and the pianist Maria Yudina, whom Stalin liked, tried to help him, he couldn’t find a job.For the rest of his life he had practically no income, and was supported by his wife, Tatyana Alisova, a specialist in Italian literature.Lokshin himself said that his serious compositional work started only in 1957, when he wrote his First Symphony (“Requiem”) which Shostakovish considered a work of genius.Such conductors as Gennady Rozhdestvensky and Rudolf Barshai were Lokshin’s champions.The last years of Lokshin’s life were marred by accusations that he was a KGB agent and that his denunciations led to arrests of several people.Many in intelligentsia turned away from Lokshin and Rozhdestvensky stopped playing his music.Some years later Lokshin’s son Alexander collected documents that seem to prove that Lokshin was discredited by the KGB to cover for a real agent.Lokshin died in Moscow on June 11th of 1987, his music practically forgotten.It still is rarely performed.
Lokshin is most interesting in his symphonic pieces, but here is an example of his piano music, Variations, in the performance by Maria Grinberg, a pianist who had also suffered terribly under the Stalin regime.
Lokshin 100
This Week in Classical Music: September 21, 2020. Alexander Lokshin. Several great composers were born this week: Jean-Philippe Rameau, for example, on September 25th of 1683, or Dmitry Shostakovich, on the same day in 1906. George Gershwin was born on September 26th of 1898. Komitas, the national composer of Armenia, was also born on the 26th, in 1869, while Mikalojus Čiurlionis, who occupies a similar place in the musical history of Lithuania, was born on September 22nd of 1875. And let’s not forget Andrzej Panufnik, one of the most interesting Polish composer of the 20th century: he was born on September 24th of 1914.
Lokshin is most interesting in his symphonic pieces, but here is an example of his piano music, Variations, in the performance by Maria Grinberg, a pianist who had also suffered terribly under the Stalin regime.