David Fanning

David Fanning (born 1955) is a professor of music at the University of Manchester. He is an expert on the music of Dmitri Shostakovich, Carl Nielsen and Soviet music. He is the author and editor of a number of books, collaborating with wife, Michelle Assay, on a book about Mieczysław Weinberg. He is also the editor of the journal Carl Nielsen Studies.

As well as being a musicologist, he is also the pianist with the Danel Quartet and a reviewer for The Daily Telegraph, Gramophone and BBC Radio 3.

Rodion Shchedrin criticized Fanning in his memoirs, referring to him as a "so-called specialist" of Soviet music.

Major publications The Breath of the Symphonist: Shostakovich's Tenth (London, 1988) Expressionism Reassessed, ed. (Manchester, 1994) Shostakovich Studies, ed. (Cambridge, 1995) Nielsen Symphony No. 5 (Cambridge, 1997) Nielsen Aladdin - critical edition (Copenhagen, 2000) Shostakovich: String Quartet No. 8 (Aldershot, 2004) Nielsen Piano Works - critical edition (Copenhagen, 2006) The Cambridge Companion to Shostakovich (Cambridge, 2008) Mieczyslaw Weinberg: In search of freedom (Hofheim, 2010) Carl Nielsen: Selected Letters and Diaries (Copenhagen, 2017)