Aram Khachaturian

Born in Tbilisi in 1903, Khachaturian arrived in Moscow at eighteen with no formal music training and enrolled at the Gnessin Musical Institute anyway. His 1936 Piano Concerto announced him; his 1940 Violin Concerto and the ballets Gayane (1942) and Spartacus (1954) carried him into the Soviet establishment, where he held high posts in the Union of Soviet Composers and joined the Communist Party in 1943. In 1948 he was denounced alongside Prokofiev and Shostakovich as a "formalist" peddling "anti-people" music, then quietly restored months later. After 1950 he taught at the Moscow Conservatory, conducted his own works across Europe and the Americas, and served as Secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers until his death in 1978. In Armenia he remains a national treasure - the composer who gave the country its first ballet, symphony, and concerto, weaving its folk modes into a sound the whole world heard.