Kara Karayev

Soviet Azberjani composer Kara Karayev (also transliterated as Gara Garayev or Qara Qarayev) gained wide popularity in the late 1940s and 1950s for ballet and orchestral scores essentially in the late Romantic tradition, with a sprinkling of ethnic color from Azerbaijan and elsewhere. Although he arguably benefited when Shostakovich ran afoul of Soviet authorities, Karayev was admired by the older composer. His music reveals an unusual mastery of orchestration. Karayev was born in Baku, Azerbaijan, on February 5, 1918, into a prominent medical family. His mother was one of the first graduates of the Russian Music Society's branch in Baku. Karayev entered the Azerbaijani State Conservatory at the age of eight and studied with the composer Uzeyir Hajibeyov, among others. He later studied with Shostakovich at the Moscow Conservatory. Two of Karayev's early compositions were performed in the late 1930s with Stalin in the audience, but the young composer avoided the dire fate that had befallen his teacher. Karayev waited out World War II teaching in Baku, and he won a Stalin Prize for the opera Motherland (1945). Two of his best-known works followed shortly after the war: the symphonic poem Leyla and Mejnun, and the ballet Seven Beauties (also condensed into a suite), both based on romantic Persian tales. In 1958 Karayev wrote a ballet, Path of Thunder, about South African apartheid. In 1961, with Cold War tensions lessening under Nikita Khruschchev, Soviet composers were invited to the first International Los Angeles Music Festival, but only Karayev and Shostakovich's tormentor Tikhon Khrennikov attended. By the time of his death in Moscow on May 13, 1982, Karayev's music had been mostly forgotten outside the Soviet Union, and for some time, performances of his music remained rare. The situation changed in the 2000s with the emigration of conductors from the former Eastern Bloc to Western countries with ensembles hungry for unfamiliar but crowd-pleasing orchestral music. An example was the Bournemouth Symphony's 2017 recording of Karayev's enchanting Seven Beauties Suite under expatriate Ukrainian conductor Kirill Karabits.
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