Pokrovsky was born in
Moscow,
Russian Empire in 1912. His first production was a staging of
Georges Bizet's
Carmen in
Nizhny Novgorod. He served as the artistic director of the Bolshoi in 1952-1963 and 1973-1982 and was named a
People's Artist of the USSR in 1961. His production of
Vano Muradeli's opera
The Great Friendship was the target of the second
Zhdanov Ukase (1948), and it was he who first staged
Sergei Prokofiev's
War and Peace, in 1946. He took this opera to Italy for its first full staging there, in 1964. In 1965 in Moscow he directed the first Russian-language production of
Benjamin Britten's ''
A Midsummer Night's Dream''. In 1972 Pokrovsky founded the
Moscow Chamber Opera Theater with
Gennady Rozhdestvensky, and he produced operas such as
Igor Stravinsky's ''
The Rake's Progress'',
Alfred Schnittke's
Life with an Idiot, and in 1974 the first Soviet production of
Dmitri Shostakovich's
The Nose since 1929. In 1975 he took the Bolshoi Theatre on its first American tour. == Awards and honors ==