Biography
Viktor Stempanovich Kosenko (1896–1938) was an Ukrainian composer. He trained at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition and theory with Mikhail Sokolov, a Rimsky-Korsakov pupil, and piano with Irina Miklashevskaya. His early years were hard, much as they certainly were for most other artists of his generation in a young Soviet Union. It wasn’t until 1929 that his employment prospects began to improve with a teaching position at Kiev’s Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama. In 1934, he accepted a post at the Kiev Conservatory, and in 1938, he received the Order of the Red Banner. With many concerts, a great deal of teaching, and a small number of published works to his credit, Kosenko died in his early forties of kidney cancer.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.