Aleksandr Lazarevich Lokshin () (1920–1987) was a Soviet composer of classical music. He was born on 19 September 1920 in the town of Biysk, in the Altai Region, Western Siberia, and died in Moscow on 11 June 1987. An admirer of Mahler and Alban Berg, he created his own musical language; he wrote eleven symphonies plus symphonic works including Les Fleurs du Mal (1939, on Baudelaire's poems), Three Scenes from Goethe's Faust (1973, 1980), the cantata Mater Dolorosa (1977, on verses from Akhmatova's Requiem). Only his Symphony No 4 is purely instrumental; all his other symphonies include vocal parts. Symphony No 3 by Lokshin was written on Kipling's verses, and a ballet Fedra was staged to music from Symphony No 4. Lokshin also wrote a cycle of piano variations for Maria Grinberg (1953) and another one for Yelena Kushnerova (1982). Life Early life The composer's father, Lazar Lokshin, was an accountant and his mother, Maria Korotkina, a midwife. Lokshin's sister, Maria, was born in 1914. The family suffered from communist repression, Lokshin's father having been classified as a capitalist because of their small farm business. Their land and cattle were confiscated, and Maria was expelled from medical school for having made a joke. After the family moved to Novosibirsk, the young Lokshin was trained at school by excellent teachers who had been exiled to Siberia from Moscow and Saint Petersburg. The renowned pianist Aleksey Shteyn, a former professor of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, laid the foundations of Lokshin's piano playing. In 1936 Lokshin arrived in Moscow with a letter of recommendation from Shteyn and was examined by Genrikh Neygauz (Heinrich Neuhaus), Director of the Moscow Conservatory. He was admitted to the Moscow Central School of Music and then, six months later, was accepted as a student at the Conservatory, where he studied composition with the composer Nikolay Myaskovsky. In 1941 Lokshin presented his symphonic work Les Fleurs du Mal (recording BIS, 2010) as his diploma work for graduation from the Moscow Conservatory. However, as the lyrics by Charles Baudelaire were considered by the censors to be contradictory to communist ideology, Lokshin was denied the Moscow Conservatory Diploma and was not allowed to take the state examinations. Nevertheless, he already was a member of the Composer's Union. World War II During World War II Lokshin was in Moscow and later returned to Novosibirsk. In July 1941 he enlisted in the people's