Nikolai Kapustin

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Nikolai Kapustin was born in Gorlovka, Ukraine in 1937. He started to play the piano at age 7 and then at 14 he moved to Moscow. There he studied piano with Avrelian Rubbakh, and later in the class of the famous professor Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatory, where his skills in classical music were reinforced. Even in his student years, Kapustin already had an interest in jazz and tried to write pieces based on his original ideas of fusing jazz idioms within a classical context. While Kapustin was still a conservatory student, he started his own quintet and worked with Yury Saulsky's Big Band as a jazz pianist, arranger and composer. After graduating from the conservatory, Kapustin joined Oleg Lundstrem's jazz orchestra with which he worked and performed for eleven years, from 1961 to 1972, throughout the former Soviet Union. Even after leaving the orchestra, he continued performing and composing in two cinema orchestras from 1972 to 1984. However in 1980 Kapustin finally became a member of the Soviet Composers' Union, and began to devote himself entirely to composing and until now continues to write a large number of pieces. Starting with the first recording issued by Melodiya in the 1980s, there are eight available recordings of his own performance pieces. His list of compositions to date includes pieces written for orchestra and big bands which were mainly composed during his activities with jazz orchestras, concerto works featuring piano or other instruments as a solo, chamber music for piano with woodwind and/or strings and sixteen piano sonatas written in various forms. In addition there are a large number and variety of shorter works for piano solos that hold an important position in his composition list. His works have recently been championed by a number of prominent pianists. Even after turning 70, his creative inspiration as a composer never fails.