Pidhoretsky, Borys

Pidhoretsky, Borys [Підгорецький, Борис; Pidhorec'kyj], b 6 April 1873 in Lubny, Poltava gubernia, d 19 February 1919 in Moscow. Composer, music critic, folklorist, pedagogue, and conductor. He graduated from the Warsaw Institute of Music, and from 1900 lived in Moscow, working as a teacher and studying composition with A. Ilinsky. In 1912 he was sent by the Russian Geographical Society’s ethnomusicological commission to study folk music in Ukraine, where he collected over 120 folk songs. From 1915 he taught choral singing at the Moscow Conservatory and was a music critic for several newspapers, among them Golos Moskvy and Izvestiia. His works include the operas Kupal'na iskra (The Kupalo Spark, 1901) and Poor Liza (1916); choral music pieces; and art songs to poems of Taras Shevchenko, Ivan Franko, and Yevhen Hrebinka. His biography, by K. Cherpukhova (1968), and a collection of his writings on musical themes (1970) were published in Kyiv.

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 4 (1993).]