VIDEO PODCAST: John Dante Prevedini leads a discussion about Classical Music and Artificial Intelligence, including contributions from George Coulouris, Michael Stephen Brown, April Fredrick, Adrian Rumson and David Rain.
RESOUNDING ECHOES: From August 2022, Robert McCarney's regular series features little-known twentieth century classical composers.
PROVOCATIVE THOUGHTS:
The late Patric Standford may have written these short pieces deliberately to provoke our feedback. If so, his success is reflected in the rich range of readers' comments appearing at the foot of most of the pages.
Russian composer Aleksey Semyonovich Zhivotov was born in Kazan on either 1 November or 14 November 1904.
Very little is known about his life, except that he studied at the Leningrad Conservatory (1924-30) with M M Chernov and with Soviet composer Vladimir Vladimirovich Shcherbachov, and that he took an active part in the musical life of Leningrad, became a committee member of the Leningrad Composers' Union and (from 1961-4) was chairman of the Leningrad Branch of the Musical Fund.
Known works include a Suite for large orchestra (1928), Fragments for Nonet (1929) and the vocal-symphonic cycle West (1932). He also wrote film music, including for Za sovetskuyu rodinu (For the Soviet Motherland, also known as Ski Battalion, 1937), Vesna v Moskve (Spring in Moscow, 1953) and Dvenadtsataya noch (Twelfth Night, 1955).
Aleksey Zhivotov died in Leningrad on 27 August 1964, aged fifty-nine.