Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, known for Anna Karenina ballet, dies aged 92 | Classical music

The Russian composer Rodion Shchedrin, who created the celebrated ballets Anna Karenina and the Carmen Suite, has died in Germany on the age of 92, Moscow’s Bolshoi Theatre mentioned on Friday.He and his spouse of 57 years, the legendary ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, dominated the Soviet and Russian cultural scene for the latter a part of the final century. She died in 2015.Shchedrin’s work ranged from choral music and concertos to opera and ballet, mixing Russian folks influences, classical traditions and avant garde method. His 1972 ballet Anna Karenina stays a staple for main theaters all over the world.The Bolshoi Theatre, the place Shchedrin labored for a few years, praised him in a press release for his “priceless artistic legacy”.“This can be a large tragedy and an irreparable loss for the complete world of artwork,” it mentioned.Born right into a household of musicians in Moscow in 1932, Shchedrin graduated from the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory.He married Plisetskaya in 1958, writing The Seagull and The Woman With the Canine, based mostly on the works of Anton Chekhov, in addition to Anna Karenina for her.Neither escaped controversy within the Soviet period. Plisetskaya particularly was watched by the KGB and banned from touring overseas for a time.A few of Shchedrin’s work, significantly the Carmen Suite, obtained a frosty reception from Soviet officers, with then tradition minister Ekaterina Furtseva decrying it as crude. “The music of the opera is mutilated,” she declared, in accordance with Russian state information company Tass.In 1973, Shchedrin grew to become president of the Union of Composers of Russia, changing Dmitri Shostakovich.From the late Nineteen Eighties onward, Shchedrin cut up his time between Moscow, Munich and Switzerland. Requested by Russian tv in 2012 for his three biggest needs, he replied: “To be with my spouse for ever.”