Necheporenko dead at 79

[Serge Rogosin]

Last week marked the passing of a giant in Russian instrumental folk music.
 Pavel Necheporenko, undoubtedly the most influential balalaika player of the
second half of the twentieth century, is dead at the age of 79.  Russia's
first full professor of balalaika and the only balalaika player ever to win
the State Prize, Necheporenko taught at the Gnessin Institute in Moscow.  He
dominated balalaika performance and education for more than a generation and
leaves a lasting legacy of arrangements, transcriptions, pedagogical
materials as well as techniques either introduced or perfected by him.  By
heartbreaking coincidence, Mikhail Danilov, St. Petersburg's leading
balalaika virtuoso and head of the St. Petersburg Conservatory's folk
instrument section, reportedly died the same day.