The Bolshoi has announced the death of Rodion Shchedrin, Russia’s most successful composer of the late and post-Communist eras. Although open to modernist ideas in his composition and teaching, and refusing to join the Communist Party, Shchedrin held the state post of president of the Composers Union from 1973 to 1990.
He enjoyed a long marriage with the ballerina Maya Plisetskaya, for whom he wrote an internationally renowned Carmen Suite.
He wrote five operas and many more ballets, along with much concert music which his friends Mstislav Rostropovich and Valery Gergiev performed widely outside Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Shchedrins lived mostly in Munich.
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