Rodion Shchedrin

Member of the Honorary Committee

Moscow composer and virtuoso pianist Rodion Shchedrin composed his first major works in his early twenties. His wide-ranging oeuvre is characterized by a unique balance between tradition and modernity.

His compositions include piano concertos, sonatas, preludes and fugues for piano, as well as operas and ballets. The Carmen Suite, an adaptation of the original opera by Georges Bizet for strings and percussion, has now become one of the most frequently performed ballet compositions of the 20th century.

In 1992, Shchedrin received the Russian State Prize for his work "The Sealed Angel." He is the first composer in the history of the Bolshoi Theater to have as much as seven works performed there. Shchedrin’s choral works, setting to music the words of Russian poets past and present, are today as prominent in the world of music as his two symphonies and his five concertos for orchestra.

Rodion Shchedrin is honorary professor at the Moscow P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory and the Rimsky-Korsakov Saint Petersburg State Conservatory. He has been a member of the Academy of the Arts (Akademie der Künste) in Berlin and the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste) since 1989.

(May 2009)