Исаак Дунаевский

Isaak Dunaevsky, or Исаак Дунаевский (January 18, 1900 in Lochwitza — July 25, 1955 in Moscow) was a prominent Soviet composer and conductor, brother of conductor Semyon Dunaevsky and composer Zinoviy Dunaevsky, and father of composer Maxim Dunaevsky, the People's Artist of USSR (1950), and a double laureate of the Stalin Prize (1941 and '51). He studied violin with Joseph Achron and Konstanty Gorski at the Kharkov Musical School, and graduated from the Kharkov Conservatory in 1919, where he was Semyon Bogatyryev's student in music theory.

Specializing in 'light music' and soundtracks, Dunaevsky had been frequently collaborating with a renowned film director Grigori Aleksandrov and wrote music for 40 films and over 80 theatrical plays, including a few seminal Soviet comedies, and authored 80 largely popular songs and romances. Many Soviet and Russian critics hailed Isaak Dunaevsky as one of the greatest composers in the USSR. He was also one of the first in the Soviet Union to start using jazz, and wrote numerous pieces for light music and jazz orchestras, as well as 14 operettas, many compositions for symphonic orchestra, piano and string quartet.