Word: aram
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Among the scorched was Sergei Prokofiev, whom many regard as the world's greatest living composer, much of whose music, including his Fifth Symphony, has been heard in the U.S. Two more of world renown were Dmitri Shostakovich (Seventh Symphony), and Aram Khachaturian (whose Saber Dance is a current U.S. jukebox sensation...
...first year on U.S. records, Soviet Composer Aram Khachaturian (TIME, Nov. 10) got in the top 15 with his flashy Gayane Ballet Suite and his trashy Piano Concerto. Beethoven, usually voted a top favorite in most U.S. bull-session polls, made the list with two piano sonatas, the Moonlight and Pathétique, neither of which rates tops with highbrow critics. Pianist José Iturbi led the single record best-sellers with Debussy's Clair de Lune and a firm version of Chopin's much-mutilated A-Flat Polonaise...
None was awaited with more interest than the new overture by brilliant young Aram Khachaturian, 43, which will have its premiere in Leningrad during the celebrations. He had scored it for 110 pieces, including a pipe organ and 18 trumpets. Said he: "It has no literary program-it is pure music." Then he hastily added: "But it has ideas . . . the legitimate feeling of pride and rejoicing for our nation's victory over the German invaders and the social significance of the 30th anniversary of the revolution...
Born of Armenian parents in Stalin's native Georgia, young Aram appeared at a Moscow music school when he was 19, with little more to offer than a conviction that he was a musician. In three years he learned to scrub passably on the cello, studied composition at the Moscow Conservatory with Miaskovsky, who had been a pupil of Rimsky-Korsakov. When Aram graduated in 1933, his name was carved on a marble panel, an honor reserved for star pupils. Khachaturian still draws heavily on his native Armenian and Georgian folk themes and rhythms for his symphonies and concertos...
...pretty wife, Nina V. Makarova, who was a student of Miaskovsky's too, has written A Cantata for Molotov. She is working on an opera, ordered by the Bolshoi Theater, based on a story of Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, a girl-Partisan heroine who was executed by the Nazis. Aram has won the Order of Lenin and two Stalin prizes (the last for his swirling, furiously rhythmic ballet, Gayane, a U.S. best-seller). He made a big hit with the Russian public during the war by returning one of his 50,000-ruble Stalin prizes ($10,000) and asking that...