I knew Alexander Lazarevich Lokshin long before I got to know his music.

He was a close friend of my husband - the pianist Anatoly Vedernikov. Shura, as we called him, visited us quite often. They sat for many hours, talking and sometimes arguing. I always admired his erudition and wit. He was very young at that time, about 25 years old; it was at the end of the War. The two musicians had a wide range of interests: music, art, history, and philosophy. In general, their thoughts used to take similar directions, they tended to agree on the matters of taste, still Vedernikov was much more of an optimist and he always hoped for something bright, while Lokshin's mood was rather pessimistic. In spite of such a close friendship I had never heard his music for some reason. Either he didn't write anything in those years, or just didn't show anything to us, but I often asked myself: "What kind of music should this extraordinary man write?"

He was a close friend of my husband - the pianist Anatoly Vedernikov. Shura, as we called him, visited us quite often. They sat for many hours, talking and sometimes arguing. I always admired his erudition and wit. He was very young at that time, about 25 years old; it was at the end of the War. The two musicians had a wide range of interests: music, art, history, and philosophy. In general, their thoughts used to take similar directions, they tended to agree on the matters of taste, still Vedernikov was much more of an optimist and he always hoped for something bright, while Lokshin's mood was rather pessimistic. In spite of such a close friendship I had never heard his music for some reason. Either he didn't write anything in those years, or just didn't show anything to us, but I often asked myself: "What kind of music should this extraordinary man write?"

Many years have passed before I got a chance to listen to Lokshin the composer for the first time. I wasn't taken by surprise when I heard the 7th Symphony, I expected something like that, but what I didn't expect was the scale, the depth, the mastery, the way orchestra sounded, the use of voice in his work, and, most importantly - the mysteriousness of his music and its beauty. Further acquaintance with his work did not in the least alter my impression of his music, but to the contrary - strengthened my conviction that Alexander Lokshin was one of the great composers of the middle of the XX century. The fact that he is relatively little known to the wide audience is to be blamed not on him, but on the "wide audience", which develops very slowly, falling behind the relentless progress of time. So, the time of Alexander Lokshin has not come yet, but if his work is nowhere to be heard, such a time will take quite long to arrive. We should think of helping "the wide audience" by releasing records of his music, performing it in concert programmes, and our musicologists should take care of creating a body of literature, explaining his work.