Russian Composers and Musicians , Preface This dictionary contains brief biographies of the most out standing figures of the Russian musical world gathered for the first time into a single volume and in one language. In the past the material has been scattered through a number of reference works written in many languages, the information found being sometimes contradictory. The volume includes not only composers but also performers, teachers and writers who have contributed to Russias rich musi cal store, past and present. A careful checking of musical pub lications of the Soviet Union has brought the list of musical personages up to date. As the purpose of this book is to provide an accessible source of essential biographical data, any critical evaluation is avoided. The best known composers such as Glinka, Borodin, Rimski-Korsakov, etc., are not allowed any greater space than the least known, as a wealth of information is available about the former ones in any musical dictionary, while a search through a number of dictionaries is very often required in order to find any material at all on the latter type of men. The lack of space does not allow giving full lists of works of any composer but in the case of the most prominent ones sources where these can be found are indicated. The transliteration of Russian names into English has always been distinguished more by variety than by consistency. Through out this book the author uses the standard transliteration adopted by the Slavonic Division of tibe New York Public Library which is perhaps more nearly phonetic than most. The reader will find cross-references from all spelling variations in general use to the uniform method used in this book. Variations in the spelling of proper names are put in parentheses after the forms used. The book contains a full bibliography of all sources consulted in addition to the individual bibliographies for the most important musicians which appear under the individual names, ALEXANDRIA VODARSKY-SHIRAEFF April 15, 1940 TRANSLITERATION OF CYRILLIC ALPHABETS Cyrillic English Pronunciation E e e e as in bed at beginning of syllable ye as in yes IE JK zh z as in azure 3 3 z z as in zest H ft i i as in machine only at end of syllable 7 y u oo as in food X X kh ch as in loch TJ n tz ts as in cats X I v ch ch as in church III m sh sh as in shall III, m shch one syllable H H y i as in ill 89 e e as in elision H 10 yu yu as in yule fl ya ya as in yard B B silent This table is only partially complete. Only the letters and combinations of letters that are pronounced differently from English are given. In indicating the pronunciation of difficult names, the fol lowing diacritical markings are used a as in arm I as in ice a as in sofa i as in ill a as in hat 6 as in old a as in ale 6 as in odd e as in eve 6 as in order e as in end oo as in food e as in her do as in foot Russian Composers and Musicians A BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY ABRAMSKI, Aleksandr Savvatyevich, 1898-a-bram ski Composer. A pupil of the Moscow Conservatory. Also known as music critic. MUSICAL WORKS SONG OF FRIENDSHIP, an opera 1937 chamber music and piano pieces. ACHRON, Isidor, 1892-a-khron Pianist and accompanist. Brother of Joseph Achron, he studied at St. Petersburg Conservatory under Vilashevski, Esi pova and Dubasov. Graduating in 1918, he toured Russia and Germany, He came to the United States in 1922. ACHRON, Joseph losif, 1886-Violinist and composer, 1899-1904, pupil of L, Auer at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Was conductor of the violin and chamber music classes of the Music School of the Imperial Russian Music Society in Kharkov from 1913 to 1916 and then served in the Russian Army until 1918. Conductor of the master class of violin and chamber music of the Petrograd Art Society, 1921-22, Spent the next two years abroad, mostly in Berlin, and came to the United States in 1925. In 1911, with Rozovski, Gnesin, G...
