The great conductor of our time Alexander Sergeevich Dmitriev

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

Musicians fuss, tune in, look through the notes, the hall is filled with a huge amount of sounds, the air is filled with the expectation of a miracle. A few minutes pass, and the artists rise and greet the conductor. He very modestly thanks his listeners and turns to the orchestra. At this very second, an amazing thing happens when one person connects a whole orchestra of dozens of people to himself. Dmitriev Alexander Sergeevich knew how to do this like no one else. For him, the profession of a conductor was not just a job - it was a whole spiritual mission.

Young conductor years

Conductor Alexander Sergeevich Dmitriev today is a professor, People's Artist, Honored Art Worker, a legendary person who is known and remembered in Russia and abroad.

Maestro was born in St. Petersburg in a family in which his father was a musician in the orchestra of the greatest Soviet conductor Evgeny Aleksandrovich Mravinsky. Love for music was instilled in him from childhood.

As a boy, he joined the choir and got the very first, but very important musical experience. In 1953, Alexander Sergeevich brilliantly graduated from the M. I. Glinka and then entered the Leningrad Conservatory named after N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov into two departments at once: conductor-choir (in the class of teacher Elizaveta Petrovna Kudryavtseva) and historical and theoretical (in the class of teacher Tyulin Yury Nikolaevich).

Feeling a further creative upsurge, Alexander Sergeevich continued to study at the Leningrad Conservatory and has already become a graduate student in the class of opera and symphony conducting with Nikolai Semenovich Rabinovich.

Becoming a Pro

After graduating from the conservatory, the maestro's studies do not end yet, and the biography of Alexander Sergeevich Dmitriev is increasingly filled with significant and outstanding events. In 1968 he trained at the Vienna Academy of Music. The conductor notes the high professionalism of the teachers at the new place of study, but nevertheless, the native walls of the Leningrad Conservatory gave him the most invaluable experience.

As a child, when his father worked for Yevgeny Alexandrovich Mravinsky, he could not imagine that a year after graduating from the conservatory he would receive invaluable experience at the Leningrad Philharmonic under the guidance of a master. Dmitriev himself noted a special reverence towards himself from the great conductor. Subsequently, Alexander Sergeevich himself replaced many timesMravinsky due to the deteriorating he alth of Yevgeny Alexandrovich.

Alexander Sergeevich Dmitriev recalls his first debut, which happened on February 5, 1967 in the great hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The conductor still keeps the poster from that important event. Since 1971, he became the chief conductor of the orchestra of this philharmonic society in St. Petersburg.

Alexander Sergeevich successfully performed in the USSR and abroad. As he himself recalled, he was very fond of traveling, but almost always this happens under duress, because he is inextricably linked with his orchestra.

Teaching activities

Dmitriev Alexander Sergeevich is also an honored teacher of the Leningrad and now the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

While still studying at the Leningrad Conservatory, at the insistence of his teacher, Alexander Sergeevich began to teach. The pedagogical work of the maestro was very long and difficult. From 1971 until 1990 he was a teacher and already as a professor he left the conservatory to devote himself more to the conducting business in the city of Stavanger in Norway. But eight years later, Alexander Sergeevich returned and again became an honorary teacher of the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

The maestro tells his students a very important truth, said by Richard Wagner, a brilliant German composer: "The score should be in the head, not the head in the score".

Concert repertoire

For his long work, Alexander Sergeevich Dmitriev conducted dozens ofand even hundreds of different works throughout Russia and Europe. He was also invited to the USA a lot.

The maestro's repertoire is incredibly wide: it starts with ancient Italian baroque music by composers Antonio Vivaldi and Johann Sebastian Bach, Russian classics by Mikhail Glinka, Modest Mussorgsky, foreign classics by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and ends with works of the most modern foreign and domestic composers.

Alexander Sergeevich went down in history as one of the few who conducted the recording of the full cycle of Beethoven and Schubert symphonies. The maestro was one of the first Soviet conductors who participated in the first productions of works by Gluck, Orff, Mahler, Debussy, Ravel, Handel, which had not previously been staged in the Soviet Union. During his long career, the conductor managed to work with many talented and famous world artists - such as pianist Polina Osetinskaya, cellist Alexei Massarsky, etc.

Happy Anniversary Maestro

In 2015, Alexander Dmitrievich celebrated his 80th birthday. On the eve of the holiday, a series of concerts was held at the St. Petersburg Philharmonic dedicated to this special date. The maestro used to celebrate his birthdays with his family. And even despite the already significant age, Alexander Sergeevich still continues to delight the audience, managing the orchestra, giving all his best at the conductor's stand.