Rodion Shchedrin (1932-2025)

News broke last week of the death of Soviet and Russian pianist-composer Rodion Konstantinovich Shchedrin at the age of 92, in Bavaria.

Born into a family that had had musical connections for at least two generations - both secular classical composition and Orthodox sacred chant - Shchedrin studied in Moscow, from where he had been evacuated as a child during the Second World War.

After a turbulent start - thrown out of the Central Music School for attacking a fellow student with a razor blade - he showed early promise first as a singer, at the Moscow Choral School, and then both as a composer and as a pianist (with Yakov Flier among his teachers at the Moscow Conservatory). An early stage appearance - performing his own piano concerto with Rozhdestvensky at the podium - encapsulates these two strands. 

Composition was soon to win out, however - with Shchedrin’s memories of hearing folk music in his youth an ever-present influence. Though drawn to officially censured composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, Shchedrin himself trod a decidedly ambiguous line between collaboration with, and resistance to, the Soviet government. He was never a Communist Party member (and proud of it - as well as of having joined Andrei Sakharov’s newly-founded opposition party in 1989 as the Union began to unravel), yet held official government posts for a quarter of a century and received several major government prizes; he faced performance bans on his more adventurous works and invasive KGB surveillance of his personal life, yet described himself in his memoirs as happy to have been born, and to have worked, in Russia. 

Musically his music is also something of a mixture - flirting with atonal and twelve-tone techniques, he also continued to draw on folk traditions and Orthodox influences, with a distinctly Romantic turn of harmony. This last would find an output in his ballets, for which a major inspiring influence must surely have been his wife, Maya Plisetskaya (d.2015) of the Bolshoi Theatre, prima ballerina assoluta after the death of Galina Ulanova and one of the most significant and beloved Soviet cultural ambassadors of the post-Stalin era. By all accounts Shchedrin was utterly devoted to her, and it is in large part that relationship that we have to thank for his ballets Carmen Suite (an adaptation of Bizet), Anna Karenina, The Seagull and others.

Away from the Bolshoi stage, Shchedrin’s compositional appetites were wide-ranging - six piano concertos, as well as concertante works for trumpet, violin, cello and oboe; three symphonies and five ‘concertos for orchestra’; seven operas (including Lolita, composed in 1993 to a commission by Rostropovich and later adapted into German); and choral and solo piano works.

Critics, both in the West and in Russia, showed a wide range of reactions to his works - perhaps reflecting his eclecticism and resistance to being pigeonholed. One work might be hailed as fresh and lively, the next dismissed as a dull waste of time. Still, his overall legacy is tremendous and his reputation in Russia particularly has climbed ever higher after the fall of Communism. Tributes have been paid by both musical and political voices right across the spectrum, from the publisher Schott to the German record label BR-Klassik and from the independent Moscow Times to the office of the Russian President, whose statement praised among other things ‘a gifted innovator and creator, and a man of wisdom, openness, and great inner dignity’.