Irina Mikhaylovna Yel'cheva

Irina Mikhailovna Yel'cheva was born in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) on 28 November 1926. A Russian composer and collector of folk songs, her training and her work were shaped by her mother, the pianist, composer and music theorist Nadezhda Bogolyubova, who had a notable influence on her.

During the Second World War she studied with Sergei Vol'fenson at the Musorgsky School in Leningrad, and then entered the city's conservatory, where she was a piano pupil of Aleksandr Kamensky, with whom she graduated in 1950, and a composition pupil of O. S. Chishko, with whom she graduated in 1958. From the mid-1950s she took part in folk song collecting expeditions: in 1953 and 1956 she travelled to the Pskov region, to northern Russia and to the lower basin of the River Pechora. From 1965 she continued this work independently in the Ivanovo region, published an edition of the songs she had collected in 1968, and in the late 1970s recorded her own performances of some of them.

Her original output revolves around two principal concerns: impressions of the war and Russian folk culture. She writes in a traditional style based on folk melodies. Her works include the opera Spartak (1961), the Symphony in Memory of the Fallen in the Siege of Leningrad (1965), the suite Pechorskiye starinï (1963), the Piano Concerto (1968) and the staged cantata K novoy zhizni (1973). Her legacy lies above all in the fusion of academic composition with the popular repertoire, and in her work as a documentarian of her country's traditional music.