Mikalay Il'ich Aladaw

Mikalay Il'ich Aladaw (also transcribed as Aladov or Nikolay Aladov) was a composer and pedagogue born in Saint Petersburg in 1890 and died in Minsk in 1972. He is regarded as a founding figure of modern Belarusian composition, and his work encompassed both the creation of music and the organisation of his country's musical institutions.

He received his initial training under Yakov Prokhorov and, in 1910, graduated from the Saint Petersburg Conservatoire as an external student. In the early 1920s he worked at the Kazan Conservatoire and at the Moscow State Institute for Musical Research. From 1924 he settled in Minsk, where he took part in founding the Belarusian Secondary Music Technical School, the Belarusian Conservatoire (today the Academy of Music of Belarus) and the Organisation of Belarusian Composers. He also taught at the Moscow and Saratov conservatoires between 1941 and 1944, and in 1946 he was appointed professor at the Belarusian Conservatoire, of which he was rector from 1944 to 1948. Between 1948 and 1949 he chaired the Union of Composers of the Belarusian SSR, and in 1955 he was awarded the title of People's Artist.

His early works, from the 1920s and 1930s, such as the Piano Quintet, the opera Taras na Parnase and the first two symphonies, set precedents in genres that had hardly been cultivated in professional Belarusian music until then, and almost all are marked by a varied use of folk turns of phrase. His Second Symphony occupies a central place in his output, as it brings together the two poles of his style: dramatic epic and lyricism. Aladaw combined a fondness for classical forms with programmatic and theatrical elements, and used continuous thematic development to achieve cyclical unity in his works.

His legacy also includes the well-known First String Quartet, a Sonata for piano and string quartet and several sonatas for wind instruments. A champion of expressive clarity and traditional forms, he is today recognised for having developed a personal language within the music of his country.