My friend Vladislav Shoot, who has died aged 81, considered himself a Ukrainian-born Russian-British composer. Slava belonged to the post-Shostakovich generation of Soviet composers who emerged in the late 1950s and 60s, the time of Nikita Khrushchev and the early Leonid Brezhnev regime.
Soviet commentators called such composers “avant garde” or “modernist”, but they were really just looking for freedom to move beyond the stale demands of Stalinist “socialist realism”. They wanted to make something new.
