Brusilovsky, Yevgeny Grigor'yevich

(b Rostov-na-Donu, 30 Oct/12 Nov 1905; d Moscow, 9 May 1981). Kazakh composer. He developed a serious interest in music while serving in the Red Army, which he left in 1922 to spend a year at the Moscow Conservatory; in 1926 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied with Steinberg, graduating in 1931. In 1933 he settled in Alma-Ata, where he began work in the research department of the Kazakh Music and Drama Technical College, studying Kazakh folksongs and kyui (programmatic fantasias for the dömbra, a plucked-string folk instrument); his folksong arrangements provided material for later compositions. From 1934 to 1938 Brusilovsky, who was of Jewish descent, was artistic director of the Kazakh Music and Drama Theatre (later the Abay Opera and Ballet Theatre), for which he composed works that laid the foundations of Kazakh national opera. In addition, he created the first Uzbek national ballet, Gulyandom (1940). From 1940 he turned his attention to instrumental music as well as stage works, producing the Third Symphony ‘Sarï arka’ (‘The Golden Steppe’, the first important work in this genre to be written in Kazakhstan, and a piece based on kyui themes) and chamber works. Brusilovsky was an organizer and the first chairman of the Kazakhstan Composers’ Union (1939–59). In 1955 he was made professor at the Alma-Ata Conservatory, where he had taught since 1934; all the leading younger Kazakh composers have been among his pupils. He settled in Moscow in 1970. He was awarded the Badge of Honour (1936), the title People’s Artist of the Kazakh SSR (1936), the Order of the Red Banner of Labour (1945, 1956), the State Prize of the USSR (1948), the Order of Lenin (1959) and the State Prize of the Kazakh SSR (1967).

Brusilovsky was trained in Russian classical traditions, and his works represent an interesting attempt to introduce the characteristic vocal monophony and distinctive instrumental harmonies of Kazakh music into the standard European genres, but without superficial orientalism. His path led from arrangements in quartal and quintal harmonies, to the introduction of these arrangements into operas as separate numbers – the operas of the 1930s were, in their first versions, essentially conversational dramas with aria-songs and instrumental dance episodes – and then (from about 1940) to the harmonic enriching of folk melodies and their organic development into large-scale sonata-symphonic forms. The experiment of introducing a kyui into the symphony proved particularly successful; apart from the Third, the Sixth, on a theme by the folk musician Kurmangaza, is notable in this respect.

WORKS

(selective list)

all first performed in Alma-Alta

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A. Kel'berg: Ye.G. Brusilovskiy (Moscow, 1959)

I. Vïzgo-Ivanova: Simfonicheskoye tvorchestvo kompozitorov Sredney Azii i Kazakhstana (1917–1967) [The orchestral work of central Asian and Kazakh composers] (Leningrad and Moscow, 1974), 58–64, 119–22

Ye. Trembovel'sky: ‘Ot priyoma k kontseptsii’ [From reception to conception], SovM (1980), no.12, 37–42

Obituary, SovM (1981), no.8, pp.143–4

B. Yerzakovitch: ‘Aksakal kazakhskoy muzïki: stranitsï tvorcheskoy biografii Ye.G. Brusilovskogo’ [The patriarch of Kazakh music: the pages of Brusilovsky’s creative work], Kompozitory Kazakhstana, ed. M.M. Akhmetova, ii (Alma-Ata, 1982), 21–42

L.M. BUTIR