January 9] – August 28, 1953) PAU, was a Soviet conductor and composer, who was married to the soprano Antonina Nezhdanova.
[1] Golovanov held some of the highest musical positions in the USSR, including an extensive association with the Bolshoi Opera.
In her autobiography, Galina Vishnevskaya terms him the theater's chief conductor, and tells of his dismissal from the Bolshoi and his death - which she attributed to the humiliation of the experience of losing this position.
Golovanov's characteristic performance mode was full-blooded and nearly vehement in tone, with a powerful, almost overloaded sense of sonority, and extreme flexibility in matters of tempo, phrasing and dynamics.
Others have characterised his approach as heavily controlling after the manner of Toscanini, excessively wayward in the way he often ignored the markings in the written score to suit his own inflated sense of musical importance, and generally self-indulgent in the extreme.