Michael L. Geller

Michael Lazarevich "Misha" Geller (Russian: Михаил Ла́заревич Геллер) (July 23, 1937 in Moscow – December 17, 2007 in Vught) was a Russian viola player and composer.

Geller was born in Moscow in 1937 in a Jewish family. He started to play the violin at the age of 7, but later on he developed a passion for the viola. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1963 as a viola player and composer. He studied composition with Professor Evgeny Golubev and Alfred Schnittke (orchestration).

As a viola player he was awarded the Gold Medal at the International Competition in Helsinki (1962). In 1966 he was a founding member of the Composer's Union String Quartet, together with Alexander Arenkow (violin), Dimitri Ferschtman (cello) and Sergei Pischugin (violin). When Russian string quartets have achieved international recognition they are given the name of a great Russian composer. The group won the First Prize at the International String Quartet Competition in Liège, Belgium in 1969 and the name Glinka was bestowed on them. With the Glinka Quartet Geller performed in many countries around the world, made a large number of records and recorded for radio and television.

From 1968 up until his emigration in 1978 he was a member of the Soviet Composer's Society in Moscow. He obtained commissions from the Russian Broadcasting Corporation to compose for the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and other symphony orchestras and to create chamber music, vocal cycles and a filmed opera for television titled The Women's Revolt with the cast of the Bolshoi Theatre, conducted by Mark Ermler.

Especially acclaimed was his Sonata for Violin and Piano (1969), which was dedicated to its first performers: violinist Alexei Michlin (the Gold Medal winner of the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels in 1963) and Georgian pianist Ziala Kwernadze, laureate of the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition in Lisbon in 1964). This composition was published by the Union of Soviet Composers in 1976 and the record label Melodiya produced a record with this composition. Music critic N. Dolinsky is cited on the cover of the record: …This composition is put together in a very modern fashion, as if written in a new language, full of expression and drama. The whole piece is constructed like a precise, graphical drawing, where every line, every hatching has its own distinct character… The monologues of the violin are particularly remarkable. They seem to fix your attention on the intense intellectual and creative process of the composer.

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