Music and Time Annotation << Back The Eve of the Sixties To the 90th Anniversary of the Birth of Rodion Shchedrin A.I. Demchenko In the 1950s, at the initial stage of Rodion Shchedrin's creative formation, the archetype of his individual style was laid, which was fully revealed in the next decade. Starting with the First Piano Concerto, the composer put down three accents that were important in different ways for his subsequent work: a very defi nite national character; appeal to the genre of ditties, which before him was only occasionally introduced into academic works; interest in the piano and in particular in the genre of piano concerto. The next major work of the young author was the ballet «The Hunchback Horse», and this again became an important milestone. Not only because the musical fairy tale he wrote turned out to be a real creative success, but also because he turned to a genre that was destined to become decisive for him, since it was in ballet that he achieved the most signifi cant artistic results – with the peak in «Anna Karenina». As we approached the 1960s, the sprouts of what later developed widely into forms of complicated and dramatic imagery ripened in the composer's early work. Its signs were most widely expressed in the First Symphony and the opera «Not only Love», where the situation of the turning point of the times that took place in the movement from the period of the mid-twentieth century (those were mainly the 1930s–1950s) to the second half of the century was revealed in different ways (it really began its countdown in Russian art in the 1960s). Keywords: creativity of Rodion Shchedrin of the 1950s, the formation of an individual style. Pp. 40-46.