Leonid Desyatnikov


Leonid Arkadievich Desyatnikov is a Russian composer who first made a reputation with a number of film scores, then achieving greater fame when his controversial opera The Children of Rosenthal was premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

Life and career

Leonid Desyatnikov was born in 1955 in Kharkiv, Ukraine. He is a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory, where he studied composition and instrumentation. Desyatnikov has penned four opera, several cantatas and numerous vocal and instrumental compositions. His principal compositions include: The Children of Rosenthal, commissioned by the Bolshoi Theatre; Poor Liza ; Gift ; The Leaden Echo ; and The Rite of Winter 1949.
Desyatnikov has been collaborating with Gidon Kremer since 1996 as a composer as well as arranging the works of Astor Piazzolla, including the tango-operita María de Buenos Aires and the tango suite Cuatro estaciones porteñas. Desyatnikov wrote the scores for the films Sunset, Lost in Siberia, Hammer and Sickle, Moscow Nights , Giselle’s Mania, Prisoner of the Mountains, All That Is Tender, Moscow, His Wife’s Diary and The Target.

Awards

Desyatnikov was awarded a Golden Ram prize and the Grand Prix of the IV International Cinema Music festival in Bonn for his score for Moscow and the special prize of the Window to Europe Cinema Festival in Vyborg. In 2006 the opera The Children of Rosenthal received the special jury prize of The Golden Mask National Theatre Award. In 2003 Desyatnikov was awarded the State Prize of Russia.

Work

Desyatnikov is the author of four operas, the symphony The Rite of Winter 1949, vocal cycles to the poems of Rilke and the OBERIU poets, and several instrumental transcriptions of themes by Ástor Piazzolla. The style of his music is defined by the composer himself as "an emancipation of consonance, transformation of banality and 'minimalism' with a human face". His favourite genre is "a tragically naughty bagatelle".

Opera

Film music