Valery Zhelobinsky - Children’s Scenes for Piano,

Valery Zhelobinsky (1913 – 1946) was a Russian composer and pianist. For his short career, Zhelobinsky’s output was large. His four operas, which include The Peasant of Komarino (Комаринский мужик), produced in Leningrad in 1933, and Mother (Мать, 1938, based on the novel by Maxim Gorky), were well received. He also wrote orchestral music including six symphonies, and three piano concertos. His Romantic Poem for violin and orchestra was premiered in Leningrad together with the first performance of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Sixth Symphony in November 1939. Shostakovich thought highly of Zhelobinsky, and argued in a 1951 letter to Mikhail Chulaki, secretary of the Union of Soviet Composers, that he should be included in a proposed list of 100 Russian composers, pointing out that ’dying at a very young stage of [his] development, [he] never reached the peak of [his] composing talents’.