Anastasiya Bespalova is a Russian

Russians

The Russian people are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Russia, speaking the Russian language and primarily living in Russia and neighboring countries....

 composer

Composer

A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...

.

Biography

Bespalova is a graduate of the Urals Mussorgsky State Conservatoire where she studied music composition under Vladimir Kobekin

Vladimir Kobekin

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kobekin is a Russian composer chiefly admired for his opera compositions....

. In 2003 she won the First Opus young composers competition in Moscow

Moscow

Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

. She later won the Mariinsky Theatre

Mariinsky Theatre

The Mariinsky Theatre is a historic theatre of opera and ballet in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Opened in 1860, it became the preeminent music theatre of late 19th century Russia, where many of the stage masterpieces of Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov received their premieres. The...

's young composers competition for an opera

Opera

Opera is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance...

 based on a subject by Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Gogol

Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol was a Ukrainian-born Russian dramatist and novelist.Considered by his contemporaries one of the preeminent figures of the natural school of Russian literary realism, later critics have found in Gogol's work a fundamentally romantic sensibility, with strains of Surrealism...

 with her one-act work Shponka and His Aunt

Shponka and His Aunt

Shponka and His Aunt is an opera in one act by composer Anastasia Bespalova. The opera uses a Russian libretto by Arkady Zastyrets which is based upon the story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol...

. The opera premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre on 21 June 2009.

Bespalova's works have also been performed at several music festivals including the New Music Days Festival in Yekaterinburg. Several of her works have been performed in concert at the Youth Academies of Russia, including the symphonic work Secrets of a Wild Wood, the string quartet A Clockwork Orange, and her choral work with saxophone and piano, A Hymn to the Sun.