Dmitri Kabalevsky

Kabalevsky was born in Saint Petersburg but grew up in Moscow, where he studied composition with Nikolai Myaskovsky and piano with Alexander Goldenweiser at the Conservatory, and later taught there as a professor. He helped found the Union of Soviet Composers and worked as a critic and editor. Music for children runs through his career: teaching piano in a school in the mid-1920s, he found too few suitable pieces and began writing his own, and in the 1970s he designed a music curriculum for Soviet general schools.

His language is tonal and traditional, in the line of Myaskovsky's school: clear diatonic melody (built on the notes of the key) with chromatic touches, regular phrases, and forms such as rondo and variations. In keeping with the official doctrine of socialist realism he relied on the song, the dance and the march, often with a Russian folk flavour, and his post-war works reached a wide public.

The Piano Concerto No. 3 in D major, Op. 50 (1952), subtitled Youth, is the last of three concertos for young performers, after the Violin Concerto (1948) and the First Cello Concerto (1949). It is dedicated to the youth of the Soviet Union, and the fifteen-year-old Vladimir Ashkenazy played the first performance in Moscow in 1953, with the composer conducting. The solo part is brilliant but meant to lie within reach of an advanced student, and the three movements follow the usual fast, slow, fast plan.