XV. Nikolai Kapustin
XIV. Nikolai Kapustin Nikolai Girschevich Kapustin, born 1937 in the Ukraine during the era of the Soviet Un- ion, is in my opinion the very greatest composer of the 1970s and ‘80s to fuse classical music with jazz. His journey was a strange one and certainly did not spin out in a straight line. Among the more curious details is the fact that he studied piano with Avrelian Rubakh, a pupil of Felix Blumenfield who had taught Vladimir Horowitz and Simon Barere. His official biography also says that he studied piano with Alexander Goldenweiser, who had known Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, Medtner and Rachmaninov, but Kapustin is quoted as saying, “He was a very interesting per- son—he remembered Rachmaninov and Medtner, so it was very interesting to speak with him. But as a teacher he gave me nothing, because he was very old—he was already 81.”1 But this is only the first of several bits of conflicting information about Kapustin and his career. One story has it that, as a jazz-loving pianist, he had to keep his jazz bias secret due to official Soviet doctrine, yet Nikita Khruschev considerably loosened the restrictions on jazz dur- ing his tenure as Premier, encouraging jazz musicians like Benny Goodman to tour the Soviet Union. One online source claims that Kapustin developed into a fine a jazz-classical composer because of his exceptional ability to improvise, but Kapustin himself is quoted as saying, “I was never a jazz musician. I never tried to be a real jazz pianist, but I had to do it because of the composing.
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