Alemdar Karamanov

Alemdar Karamanov’s mother was a Don Cossack, his father, who had studied in Moscow, came from Turkey. The composer himself was born in 1934 in Simferopol, the capital of the autonomous republic of Crimea, where the family would survive the German occupation during the Second World War. In 1944 his father was exiled by the Soviet authorities to Kazakhstan, where he would die. Despite growing up under difficult circumstances, Karamanov received music lessons and started composing at the age of five, writing his first opera when he was nine. In 1953 he passed the entrance examination for the Moscow Conservatoire, where he studied composition with Semyon Bogatyrev and piano with Vladimir Natanson (who had trained with, among others, Samuil Feinberg). According to Alfred Schnittke, Karamanov learnt “everything improbably fast” at the Conservatoire, while at the same time tirelessly writing one work after another: while he was a student, he wrote seven out of his total of 24 symphonies, a ballet, a piano concerto, two piano sonatas and numerous smaller pieces of symphonic and chamber music. When Karamanov’s teacher Bogatyrev showed his Second Symphony to Dmitri Shostakovich, his frequently-quoted reaction was: “An interesting and independent talent whose originality is unmistakable, even in his student works.” The Ukrainian composer graduated in 1958 and then undertook further study with Dmitri Kabalevsky and Tikhon Khrennikow until 1963. Karamanov’s refusal to submit to the official precepts of the pseudo-aesthetic of “socialist realism” repeatedly prompted sharp reactions from the Soviet authorities and ultimately led to his music being banned almost entirely. He moved back to his native city of Simferopol and spent his life in poverty in Crimea. Only when a tape recording of his compositions reached England in 1991 did his work come to the attention of a Western audience – in part through the Deutsche Symphonie Orchester and Vladimir Ashkenazy, who performed the world premiere of Karamanov’s 23rd Symphony as part of the die Berliner Festspiele 1995.