Fiala, George

Composer George Fiala (b. 1922, Kyiv, Ukraine, d. 2017, Montreal, Canada) was born into a family of amateur musicians, and he enrolled in a preparatory school for the Kyiv Conservatory in 1934. He subsequently studied at the Kyiv Conservatory with Borys Liatoshynsky and Lev Revutsky, received his doctorate from the Akademische Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where he studied with Wilhelm Furtwängler, and completed post-doctoral studies at the Royal Conservatory of Music in Brussels. In 1949 he settled in Montreal.

As a composer, Fiala combined the traditions of Ukrainian music, German Neo-Romanticism and the twelve-tone techniques of the New French School. He produced more than 150 works, including symphonies, concertos for piano, violin and flute, quintets, quartets, trios and sonatas for strings and winds, solo piano works, choral pieces, art songs, an operetta, a ballet and a liturgy. His works have been performed by virtually every orchestra in Canada, and commissions on Ukrainian subjects constitute an important part of his output.