Aleksandra Nikolayevna Pakhmutova is a Soviet and Russian composer. She has remained one of the best known figures in Soviet and later Russian popular music since she first achieved fame in her homeland in the 1960s. People's Artist of the USSR. She was born on 9 November 1929 in Beketovka, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union, and began playing the piano and composing music at an early age. She was admitted to the prestigious Moscow Conservatory and graduated in 1953. In 1956 she completed a post-graduate course led by the outstanding composer Vissarion Shebalin. Her career is notable for her success in a range of different genres. She has composed pieces for the symphony orchestra ; the ballet Illumination; music for children ; and songs and music for over a dozen different movies from Out of This World in 1958 to Because of Mama in 2001. She is best known for some of her 400 songs, including such enduringly popular songs as The Melody, Russian Waltz, Tenderness, Hope, The Old Maple Tree, The Song of the Perturbed Youth, a series of the Gagarin Constellation, The Bird of Happiness and Good-Bye Moscow which was used as the farewell tune of the 22nd Olympic Games in Moscow in 1980. Tenderness was used with great effect in Tatyana Lioznova's 1967 filmThree Poplars on Plutschikha. Her husband, the eminent Soviet era poet Nikolai Dobronravov, contributed lyrics to her music on occasion, including songs used in three films. One of her most famous ballads is Belovezhskaya Pushcha, composed in 1975, which celebrates Bialowieza Primaeval Forest, a last remnant of the European wildwood split now between Poland and Belarus. Another much-aired song was Malaya Zemlya, about a minor outpost where the then Soviet leaderLeonid Brezhnev served as a political commissar during World War II. Alexandra Pakhmutova found favour with the state establishment as well as the public. Reputedly Brezhnev's favourite composer, she received several Government Awards and State Prizes and served as the Secretary of the USSR and Russian Unions of Composers. She was named Hero of Socialist Labour in 1990. Her name was given to Asteroid# 1889, registered by the planetary centre in Cincinnati, Ohio, United States.
Popular Songs
":ru:Надежда |Надежда" "Nadezhda"
":ru:Песня о тревожной молодости|Песня о тревожной молодости" "Pesnya o Trevozhnoy Molodosty"
USSR State Prize – for the music for the film "O Sport, You – the world"
Lenin Komsomol Prize – a song cycle about youth and the Komsomol Prize of the Union State of Russia and Belarus for literary and artistic works that make a significant contribution to strengthening the relations of brotherhood, friendship and comprehensive cooperation between the countries – members of the Union State
