Gavriil Nikolayevich Popov

His photo makes him look like a war criminal or, perhaps, a member of Leonid Brezhnev's politburo… but he was 'only' a Soviet composer!

Cataloguing Russian or Soviet composers is always fraught with difficulty: technically, he would have spelled his own name Гаврии́л Никола́евич Попо́в, and probably without the stress marks, but we don't want piles of Cyrillic clogging up our English-speaking music tags, I think!

So then we get into Cyrillic-to-Latin transliteration problems -and also the hoary old question of whether to use his patronymic name or not. Some Soviet-era composers generally don't: we talk of Dmitri Shostakovich, for example, not Dmitri Dmitryevich Shostakovich. In Mr. Popov's case, the inclusion of the patronymic in the general spelling out of his name is mandated by the New Grove dictionary. As usual, Wikipedia gets it right in the body of the article about him, but cannot seem to get the article heading to agree! Last.fm, as ever, is pretty hopeless: there are at least four versions of him there, including ‘Popov, Gavriil’, in case you missed the card index approach to cataloguing things; and an assortment of with- and without-patronymic variants. Sadly, the variant with the most listeners is just flat-out wrong, which is unfortunately pretty much par for the course as far as Last.fm are concerned.

Anyway: Gavriil Nikolayevich Popov it is and should be.

He was born in Novocherkassk in 1904 -near Rostov-on-Don and thus relatively close to the Ukrainian border. He was to die at Rapino, just outside St. Petersburg (Leningrad as he would have known it, of course) in 1972, an inveterate alcholic. He studied composition and piano at the Leningrad Conservatory, At the outset of his composing career he was seen as a sort-of Shostakovich equivalent -and his first symphony was denounced in terms Shostakovich would have been very familiar with: formalism (meaning 'pure, academic music that has no relevance to the worries of the people'). After Shostakovich's denunciation for this grave sin in 1936, Popov's music became much more Soviet realist, conservative and populist. He thus went on to win the Stalin Prize for 1946. Nevertheless, his orchestral music is brilliant and appealing (as you'd perhaps expect, given the context in which it was written!)

His output includes 6 completed symphones (and drafts of a seventh); a single string quartet, more than 30 film scores, assorted choral works (including such gems as “Heroic Poem for Lenin” and “The Communist, Someone Like You and Me”) and three operas.

---