Born on 22 April 1892, died in Saint-Cloud near Paris on 13 June 1954; Nikolaj Obuchov was a Russian-French composer. In 1911 he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatory and from 1913 to 1916 moved to the St Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied with Maximilian Steinberg and Nikolaj Tcherepnin. In 1915 and 1916 first works were performed in St Petersburg in which he presented a notation system of his own without accidentals. After the October Revolution he went to Paris in 1918 and became a pupil there of Maurice Ravel. His life’s work is the monumental “Le Livre de Vie”; in 1947 he published the “Traite d’harmonie tonale, atonale et totale” with a preface by Arthur Honegger. Together with his pupil Marie-Antoinette Aussenac-Broglie he promoted the croix sonore, an electronic instrument akin to the theremin. In the Cybele catalogue his piano music is heard on two albums of the series Piano Works around Russian Futurism (Vol. 1, 2009 and Vol. 4, 2016), recorded by Thomas Günther on the Steinway D concert grand.
Nikolaj Obuchov
Composer
