On March 22, Vitebsk / Diana Kurilo - BELTA /. The music school where the renowned Belarusian composer and educator Anatoly Bogatyrev studied will officially be named after him today, the Culture Department of the Vitebsk City Executive Committee informed a BELTA correspondent. The initiative belongs to the school's teachers, who carried out extensive preparatory work to perpetuate the memory of the People's Artist of the BSSR, People's Artist of the RSFSR, composer, Chairman of the Composers' Union of the BSSR, laureate of the State Prizes of the BSSR and the Stalin Prize, founder of the Belarusian national composing school, and Honorary Citizen of Vitebsk, Anatoly Bogatyrev, and coordinated the naming with the composer's relatives. The city authorities also supported the initiative. Anatoly Bogatyrev was born in Vitebsk in 1913 and studied at the Vitebsk Music School from 1927 to 1930. The school was opened after the reorganization of the People's Conservatory in 1919. Among the archival documents kept at the school is the protocol of an academic concert where the young Bogatyrev performed works by Rachmaninoff and Bach. Anatoly Bogatyrev's teacher in Vitebsk was Evgenia Shuman, the granddaughter of the German composer Robert Schumann. During his lifetime, Anatoly Bogatyrev agreed to have the regional competition for young composers named after him. The competition was initiated in 1999 by Nina Ustinova, a member of the Belarusian Composers' Union. In 2011, students of Vitebsk Music School No. 1, Kirill Yachmenev, Olga Makarova, and Anna Lafayenko, became laureates of the A.V. Bogatyrev competition. Many of Anatoly Bogatyrev's works have become classics. He nurtured more than one generation of Belarusian composers, including Yevgeny Glebov, Igor Luchenok, Yuri Semenyako, and Sergei Cortes. -0-

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