Draft:Grigori Kompaneyets

Grigori 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 1904-04, he took voice lessons in Milan, with the Italian tenor Augusto Brogi. 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 emigrated to Mandatory Palestine. He returned to the Soviet Union in the early 1930s.

From 1932 to 1934, Kompaneyets taught conducting and score-reading at the Kharkiv Institute of Music and Drama, now the Kharkiv I. P. Kotlyarevsky National University of Arts. 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 the same year, he began teaching at the Kyiv Conservatory; he was appointed as a professor there in 1940, a position he held until 1952.