Giya Kancheli is a renowned Georgian composer born in 1935 in Tbilisi. He studied piano as a child and later composition at the Tbilisi Conservatory from 1959-1963. Kancheli is known for his spiritual, emotionally expressive scores that draw inspiration from Georgian folklore. He has received numerous awards including the Nika Award and World Prize in Arts. Kancheli initially taught at the Tbilisi Conservatory but emigrated to Germany in 1991 and later Belgium, finding greater international success for his compositions after leaving the Soviet Union.

1. • BORN
10 August 1935, Tbilisi
• AGE
80 years old
• KNOWN FOR
composing music
• EDUCATION
studied piano at a music school in
Tbilisi as a child, later composition
at the Conservatory of Music in
Tbilisi from 1959–63
• AWARDS
Nika Award for Best Music Score
Wold Prize in Arts

2. Giya Kancheli is Georgia's most
distinguished living composer and a
leading figure in the world of
contemporary music. Kancheli's scores,
deeply spiritual in nature, are filled with
haunting aural images, varied colors and
textures, sharp contrasts and shattering
climaxes. His music draws inspiration
from Georgian folklore and sings with a
heartfelt, yet refined emotion; it is
conceived dramaturgically with a strong
linear flow and an expansive sense of
musical time. A man of uncompromising
artistic integrity, Kancheli has been
called by Russian composer Rodion
Shchedrin, "an ascetic with the
temperament of a maximalist -- a
restrained Vesuvius."

3. Kancheli was born on August 10, 1935, in
Tbilisi, Georgia. Originally intending to study
geology at Tbilisi University, he switched to
music instead, attending Tbilisi Conservatory
from 1959-63 and receiving a state stipend for
his academic accomplishments. In 1962 he
won a prize at the All-Union Young Composers
Competition, but alienated many potential
supporters and angered many Soviet politicos
with his acknowledged love of American jazz.
Because of this, his Concerto for Orchestra
received harsh criticism. He joined the Tbilisi
Conservatory faculty in 1970, and was named
musical director for the city’s Rustaveli
Theatre the following year. His 20-year tenure
at Rustaveli infused theatrical elements into
many of his subsequent compositions,
including his opera Music for the Living, which
he wrote with Rustaveli director Robert Sturua.

4. With the breakup of the Soviet Union in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, Georgia
was plunged into a violent rebellion
against Moscow. The strife convinced
Kancheli to emigrate to Germany in
1991 (some sources say 1992). He later
relocated to Antwerp, Belgium. After
emigrating, his works became known
internationally, and he has since been
recognized as one of the most important
composers of the twentieth and early
twenty-first centuries.

5. Kancheli has written seven symphonies and a
"liturgy" for viola and orchestra, Mourned by
the Wind. His Fourth Symphony ("In
Memoria di Michelangelo") received its
American premiere with the Philadelphia
Orchestra, Yury Temirkanov conducting, in
January 1978, shortly before the cultural
freeze in the United States against Soviet
artists. The advent of glasnost brought
growing exposure for and recognition of
Kancheli's distinctive musical voice, leading
to prestigious commissions and increasingly
frequent performances in Europe and
America. Dennis Russell Davies, Jansug
Kakhidze, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Kim
Kashkashian, Mstislav Rostropovich and the
Kronos Quartet are among his passionate
champions. In recent seasons, world
premieres of specially commissioned works
have taken place in Seattle (Piano Quartet in
L'istesso Tempo by the Bridge Ensemble,
1998) and New York (And Farewell Goes Out
Sighing... for violin, countertenor and
orchestra by the New York Philharmonic
under Kurt Masur, 1999). North American
premieres of major scores by Kancheli have
been presented by the Philadelphia and
Chicago Symphony Orchestras and at the
Vancouver International New Music Festival.
In May 2002, he returned to these shores for
the eagerly awaited premiere performances
of Don't Grieve, a commission by the San
Francisco Symphony for baritone and
orchestra, with Dmitri Hvorostovsky as
soloist and Michael Tilson Thomas

6. Kancheli's compositional style owes much to
his work in the theatre. For two decades he
served as Music Director of the Rustaveli
Theatre in Tbilisi. His opera, Music for the
Living, which has won considerable praise in
the former Soviet Union and Western
Europe since its June 1984 premiere, was
written in collaboration with the Rustaveli's
director Robert Sturua. In December 1999,
the original collaborators restaged the
opera for the Deutsches National Theater in
Weimar. Among Kancheli's other recent
scores are Diplipito for cello, counter-tenor
and chamber orchestra, Time... and Again
for violin and piano (1997), Rokwa for large
symphony orchestra (1999) and Styx for
viola, mixed chorus and orchestra (1999).
After electrifying performances of Mourned
by the Wind at the Brooklyn Philharmonic in
the fall of 1993, critics raved: "superb,"
"there is no denying the powerful sincerity
of this music and its riveting hold on the
imagination -- a grip that doesn't relent until
the consoling conclusion in which the
individual and his turbulent, unpredictable
universe arrive at a reconciliation."

7. Since his emigration to the West,
Kancheli’s music has reached a wider
audience and won nearly unanimous
praise. Kancheli has written that he
considers his work a cohesive
whole. “But sometimes I have the
impression that everything I write is part
of a single work I began in my youth, one
that will only be complete when I finally
depart from this life or am no longer
capable of composing,” Kancheli wrote
in the CD liner notes for Magnum
Ignotum. “The flow of thoughts in this
one work the length of a lifetime
corresponds to a mental state which
continually changes while remaining
essentially the same. Grief, regret, the
repudiation of violence. Hope
predominates over happiness and joy.”