(Nikolayevsk-on-Amur, Russia 11/11/1894 - New York 4/26/1965)
Aaron Avshalomov was a Russian composer. He was born in Nikolajevsk-na-Amure, a small city based on naval trade in the Far East, in eastern Siberia, where his grandfather had started a profitable business after being exiled from the Caucasus in the 1870s. He belonged to a family of "mountain Jews", an ethnic group from today's Dagestan (in the eastern Caucasus) who moved to the Far East in the second half of the 19th century. After a brief period of medical and conservatory studies in Zurich he moved to San Francisco following the outbreak of the October Revolution, then moved almost immediately to Beijing, where he opened a bookstore. Here, he was enormously impressed by the Chinese approach to music and dedicated himself to self-taught composition. After another brief period in the United States in the 1920s, he moved to Shanghai, where there was at the time a huge community of Russians, traders (particularly from the Russian Far East, Chinese Manchuria, and Harbin attracted by the growth of the city), Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, artists and counter-revolutionaries or "white Russians".
Avshalomov worked as a librarian from 1928 to 1943, at the same time devoting himself to composition; for years, he tried to unite "east" and "west," trying to merge the melodies and rhythms of China with the European orchestral tradition, often resorting to pentatonic scales and percussion instruments from East Asia. Composing works such as Kuan Yin (1925), The Twilight Hours of Yang Guifei (1933), and The Great Wall (1941). In his works, we can also see influences from the Indian and Indochinese musical traditions, but also from traditional music and the Jewish literary tradition.
During the years of the Japanese occupation of China, he was first under house arrest. Then, between 1943 and 1946, he was appointed director of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra. He then moved again to the United States, where he died in 1965. His son Jacob, born in Qingdao in 1919 and also a musician, contributed to making his father's works known.
The Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1935) is an excellent example of his particular language; the almost Chinese melodies welded with the orchestration and the Russian flavor create an engaging and light plot, with memorable moments and frequent color changes. It is in three movements—a large-scale Andante, a central expressive, and a lively finale—two cadences, much melody, and virtuosic passages; it is an excellent, lesser-known concert and competition piece.
