Malko, Mykola

Malko, Mykola or Nicolai [Малько, Микола; Mal'ko], b 4 May 1883 in Brailiv, Vinnytsia county, Podilia gubernia, d 23 June 1961 in Sydney, Australia. Conductor. He studied under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, A. Liadov, A. Glazunov, and N. Tcherepnin in Saint Petersburg, Mykola Lysenko in Kyiv, and F. Mottl in Munich before taking a position with the Saint Petersburg Opera (1909–18). He then moved between Vitsebsk and Moscow, Kyiv, and Kharkiv (1921–4) before returning to Leningrad to teach in the Conservatory and conducted the Philharmonic. From 1928 he toured Western Europe to considerable acclaim, and in 1930 he emigrated permanently to the West. He settled initially in Copenhagen, where he founded the Danish National Orchestra. In 1940 he moved to the United States of America to teach conducting at Mills College in Oakland and then conducted the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. He subsequently conducted the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra in Great Britain (1954–6) and the Sydney Orchestra in Australia (1956–61). His performances of Peter Tchaikovsky, N. Miaskovsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Borys Liatoshynsky, and others were highly regarded for their clarity and balance. Malko conducted many world premieres, including N. Miaskovsky’s Symphony no. 5 (Moscow, 1920) and the first two symphonies of the young Dmitrii Shostakovich (Leningrad, 1926 and 1927). He was also the first to conduct in the West the ‘Galician Dances’ from Liatoshynsky’s opera The Golden Ring. Widely recorded, Malko earned particularly high regard for his discs with the London Symphony Orchestra. He also wrote a methodological study, The Conductor and His Baton (1950), and a memoir about his mentors, A Certain Age (1966). A collection of his writings was translated into Russian and published in Leningrad in 1972.

Roman Savytsky

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]