Gavriil Popov (composer)

Popov studied at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1922 until 1930 with Leonid Vladimirovich Nikolayev, Vladimir Shcherbachov, and Maximilian Steinberg.

The symphony had its premiere by the Leningrad Philharmonic in 1935 and was immediately banned by a local censor; Popov was accused of formalism, a terrible stigma at the time.

[1] Following his own censorship episode and the anonymous denouncing of Shostakovich in 1936, Popov began writing in a more conservative idiom in order to avoid further charges of formalism.

Recent research claims that the progressive aesthetical approach of his early years has been transformed and secretly kept in a politically more accessible, yet maintaining a highly socio-critical music language.

His sense of the orchestra, brilliant and buoyant, his grasp of large formal patterns, as found in the huge Symphony No.