Conservatory

The Ukrainian-American violinist Oleh Krysa is long esteemed in the former USSR as a distinguished soloist, chamber musician and teacher. A prominent student of David Oistrakh, Oleh Krysa won major prizes in such international competitions as the Wieniawski, Tchaikovsky and Montreal, and was the outright winner of the Paganini Competition.

Born in Shanghai in 1955, Xiaogang Ye is regarded as one of China’s leading contemporary composers. From 1978 until 1983, he studied at the composition department of the Central Conservatory of Music in China, and after graduation was appointed resident composer and lecturer at the Conservatory. From 1987, he studied at the Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester in New York. His former teachers include Mingxin Du, Samuel Adler, Joseph Schwantner, Louis Andriessen and Alexander Goehr. After he returned home from the US in 1994, Xiaogang Ye served as a professor in the composition department of the Central Conservatory of Music, a doctoral advisor, the Deputy Dean of the composition department and Educational Inspector of the Conservatory. From 2009 to 2018 he worked as one of four vice presidents of the Central Conservatory of Music.

The music of Komitas (1869-1935), the Armenian musicologist and composer, is voluminous and diverse. It encompases liturgical chants, art and folk songs, choral settings and piano pieces, all of which capture, as no other composer's work has done, the Armenian ethos. The human voice in song is the path which Komitas' compositional thinking takes. In his dual role of musicologist and composer, Komitas produced a body of work which is characterized by a continuing search for the compositional possibilities of the folk elements of Armenian village life….

Nikolai Myaskovsky was born on April 20, 1881 in Novogeorgiyevsk. His father was a military engineer whose assignments took him to various cities in Russia. The family finally settled in St. Petersburg, where Nikolai enrolled in the Military Academy. He studied at the Academy of Military Engineering from 1888-1802. After graduating from the Academy, Myaskovsy served as a military engineer in Moscow where he met and began music studies with Reinhold Gliere. In 1804 his army reassignment sent him St. Petersburg.