Romual'd Samuilovich Grinblat

Romual'd Samuílovich Grínblat (Tver', 1930 – Saint Petersburg, 1995) was a Russian composer whose output moved between 'absolute' instrumental music and incidental music for film and theatre. His career unfolded largely outside central Russia, in the Baltic and Soviet spheres, which explains the influence of the Latvian school on his training and early posts.

He studied composition with Adolfs Skulte at the Riga Conservatory between 1950 and 1955. He then worked as a sound engineer at Latvian Radio (1955–1957) and as an editor at the Latvian State Publishing House (1957–1961). In 1971 he moved to Leningrad, where in 1982 he was appointed senior editor of the local division of the publisher Sovetskiy Kompozitor. He received the Latvian State Prize in 1961 and, in 1987, the title of Honoured Artist of Russia.

His music combines two strands that, from the ballet Rigonda (1959), one of the first Latvian ballets, coexisted and interacted. The incidental music for Bulgakov's play Kabala svyatosh, commonly known as Molière's Life, gave rise to an instrumental suite in which avant-garde and Baroque styles confront one another in a manner that recalls Schnittke's polystylism. In works such as the rock opera Flamandskaya legenda, the raw brutality of its popular source is united with a highly refined thematic development. Many of his absolute works, meanwhile, have a strong visual quality, almost that of instrumental theatre, and combine strict serial structures with limited aleatoric elements, such as loosely defined piano clusters.

Nono considered his Fourth Symphony (1967) the most significant work of the Soviet era after Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony. His catalogue also includes nine symphonies, ballets, musicals, more than twenty film scores and more than forty theatre scores, which places his work at the centre of the late Soviet scene.