Désiré-Alexandre Batton, was a French composer, and was a student of which Italian composer who spent most of his working life in France, and Beethoven regarded him as the greatest of his contemporaries?
Désiré-Alexandre Batton Désiré-Alexandre Batton (born Paris, January 2, 1798 - died Versailles, October 15, 1855) was a French composer. A student of Luigi Cherubini at the Conservatoire de Paris, he composed operas and cantatas; a number of his operas were seen at the Théâtre Feydeau and the Opéra-Comique. In 1817 he took first place in the Prix de Rome competition for his cantata "La Mort d'Adonis".
Alexander Kantorov Alexander Kantorov (born 1947) is a Russian conductor who was born in Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) and was a graduate of both Moscow and Saint Petersburg Conservatories. He used to take violin lessons under guidance from Mikhail Vaiman and then completed postgraduate education under guidance from Yuri Temirkanov. He began his conducting career at the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra and then became both a fonder and head conductor of both Sverdlovsk and Saint Petersburg Symphony Orchestras. Currently he conducts numerous works by such famous Russian composers as Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Sergei Prokofiev, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Dmitri Shostakovich, Alexander Taneyev, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, as well as German composers such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Julian Cochran from Australia and Gustav Mahler with Anton Bruckner from Austria. Besides those, he also conducted works of Hector Berlioz and Antonín Dvořák.