Aram Khachaturian was a Soviet Armenian composer of the twentieth century, born in Tbilisi and based in Moscow from 1921 onward, where he trained and spent his professional career. His output centers on ballet, orchestral, and concerto music, including the ballets Gayane (1942) and Spartacus (1954), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and film scores, drawing heavily on Armenian and Caucasian folk idioms fused with Russian and European classical technique. He died in Moscow in 1978 and is buried in Yerevan.

Khachaturian is widely regarded, alongside Shostakovich and Prokofiev, as one of the leading Soviet composers of the twentieth century, and as the most internationally renowned Armenian composer, having produced the first Armenian symphony, concerto, and ballet. His vivid orchestral color and folk-inflected melodies, epitomized by the popular “Sabre Dance” from Gayane, have kept his ballet scores and concertos in the standard repertoire, even as some Western critics have viewed his music as more populist than the work of his weightier Soviet contemporaries.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aram_Khachaturian