Stalin's music man, who outlived them all
Now Playing: Tikhon Nikolayevich Khrennikov
Topic: NEWS composers
He was a figure barely known by most concertgoers in the West, but he was a major force in Russian music of the 20th century, not for his many compositions but for his role as a cultural official appointed by Stalin in 1948 to lead the country's composers' union. During the grim final years of the Stalin era, in keeping with the ideological campaign of the day, Khrennikov notoriously attacked the country's most prominent composers - among them Dmitri Shostakovich and Sergei Prokofiev. But, strange to say, Khrennikov was also one of the great survivors of the Soviet Union......MORE...