Draft:Grigori Kompaneyets

• Comment: If/when accepted, the first name should be Grigory, per this. -- DoubleGrazing (talk) 12:42, 18 February 2025 (UTC)

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Grigory Isaakovich Kompaneyets (Григорій Ісакович Компані́єць, 1881-1959) was a Ukrainian Jewish composer, choir conductor, and educator.

Biography

Grigory Kompaneyets was born in Poltava, Ukraine. During his childhood, his family moved to Rostov, where he received his early musical training in the synagogue choir. In 1904-05, he took voice lessons in Milan, with the Italian tenor Augusto Brogi. He was active in the Society for Jewish Folk Music, and in 1912, he conducted the first performance of the opera Samson and Delilah in a modern Hebrew translation, at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. In 1916, he conducted an orchestra of 83 musicians for a concert organized by Society for Jewish Folk Music in St. Petersburg. In the same year, he graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory.

In the mid-1920s, Kompaneyets moved to Mandatory Palestine, where he served as musical director of Habimah. He returned to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. From 1932 to 1934, he taught conducting and score-reading at the Kharkiv National University of Arts, and at the same time headed the music department of the Jewish Theater. In 1934, one of his choral compositions, A Regendl, was presented to the American choral conductor John Finley Williamson, during the Westminster Chorus's visit to the Soviet Union. In 1940, he was appointed to the rank of professor at the Kyiv Conservatory, a position he held until 1952. Concurrently, from 1941 to 1943 he was choirmaster at the Ulyanovsk House of Culture and head of the music department of the theater in Nukus, Karakalpakstan SSR.

He died on January 16, 1959 in Kyiv.

Selected Works

• Children's operas:
  • "Snow Hut" (1939)
  • "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" (1939; 2nd edition – 1954)
  • "The Glove" (1940)
  • "The Crooked Duck" (1946)
• For Wind Orchestra – Two Marches (1952)
• For string quartet – Quartet (1925, manuscript lost. Score reconstructed by Alon Schab, 2021),  “Ukrainian Dance” (1947)
• For piano – Sonata (1925), Natella (1926), Scherzo (1948), two suites (1952, 1958), Variations on a Ukrainian folk song (1953)
• For chorus – "A Regendl" (The Shower), 1934; American edition (as "Adoizdechic," 1963)