Haieff, Alexei (Vasilievich)
Haieff, Alexei (Vasilievich)
Haieff, Alexei (Vasilievich), Russian-American composer; b. Blagoveshchensk, Siberia, Aug. 25, 1914; d. Rome, March 1, 1994. He received his primary education at Harbin, Manchuria. In 1931 he went to the U.S., where he studied with Goldmark and Jacobi at the Juilliard School of Music in N.Y. (1934–38). In 1938-39 he also studied with Boulanger in Paris and in Cambridge, Mass. He held a Guggenheim fellowship in 1946 and again in 1949, and was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1947–48). He was a prof, at the Univ. of Buffalo (1962–68), and composer-in-residence at the Univ. of Utah (1968–70). His Piano Concerto won the N.Y. Music Critics’ Circle Award and his 2nd Sym. the American International Music Fund Award. In his music, Haieff followed Stravinsky’s neo-Classicism, observing an austere economy of means, but achieving modernistic effects by a display of rhythmic agitation, often with jazzy undertones.
Works
dramatic: Ballet: The Princess Zondilda and Her Entourage (1946); Beauty and the Beast (1947). ORCH.: 3 syms.: No. 1 (1942), No. 2 (Boston, April 11, 1958), and No. 3 (New Haven, Conn., April 11, 1961); Divertimento (N.Y., April 5, 1946); Violin Concerto (1948); Piano Concerto (N.Y., April 27, 1952); Éloge for Chamber Orch. (1967). CHAMBER: Sonatina for String Quartet (1937); 3 Bagatelles for Oboe and Bassoon (1939); Serenade for Oboe, Clarinet, Bassoon, and Piano (1942); Eclogue for Cello and Piano (1947); La Nouvelle Héloïse for Harp and String Quartet (1963); Cello Sonata (1963); Rhapsodies for Guitar and Harpsichord (1980); Wind Quintet (1983). piano: Sonata for 2 Pianos (1945); Sonata (1955). VOCAL: Caligula for Baritone and Orch., after Robert Lowell (N.Y., Nov. 5, 1971); songs.
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire