Giya Kancheli, born 10 August 1935, in Tbilisi, is a Georgian composer resi… Read Full Bio ↴Giya Kancheli, born 10 August 1935, in Tbilisi, is a Georgian composer resident in Belgium. His music is often spiritual, leading some to compare him (not always helpfully) to composers such as Arvo Pärt and John Tavener. There are several instances of folk and religious inspiration in his music, notably in the opening of the Third Symphony and his more recent work Magnum Ignotum, but the effect of Georgian folk elements on his style should not be overemphasized.

Since 1991, Kancheli has lived in Western Europe: first in Berlin, and since 1995 in Antwerp, where he is composer-in-residence for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.

n his symphonies, Kancheli's musical language typically consists of slow, haunting scraps of minor-mode melody against long, subdued, anguished string discords. These passages are occasionally punctuated with "battle scenes" involving martial brass and percussion. His music post-1990 has become more refined and generally more subdued and nostalgic in character. Some commentators talk about his music in cinematic terms; one can find equivalents of the dissolve (in his ubiquitous blurred tonal transitions), zoom (such as the long crescendo a third of the way into the Sixth Symphony), abrupt cuts (jumping from very quiet to very loud, as in the opening of the Fifth Symphony), and so on. Rodion Shchedrin speaks of Kancheli as "an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist; a restrained Vesuvius".

Kancheli has written seven symphonies, and what he terms a liturgy for viola and orchestra, called Mourned by the Wind. His Fourth Symphony received its American premiere, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov, in January 1978, not long before the cultural freeze in the United States against Soviet culture. Glasnost allowed Kancheli to regain exposure, and he began to receive frequent commissions, as well as performances within Europe and America.

Championed internationally by the likes of Dennis Russell Davies, the late Jansug Kakhidze, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Kim Kashkashian, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Kronos Quartet, Kancheli has seen world premieres of his works in Seattle, as well as with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. He continues to receive regular commissions. New CDs of his recent works are regularly released, notably on the ECM label.

In Georgia, Kancheli's work is well-known in the theatre, from which he draws much of his musical composition. For two decades, he served as the music director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi. He composed an opera Music for the Living, in collaboration with Rustaveli director Robert Sturua, and in December 1999, the opera was restaged for the Deutsches National Theater in Weimar. He has written music for dozens of films, many of them well-known in the Russian-speaking world but virtually unknown outside it, such as Georgi Daneliya's sci-fi cult hit Kin-dza-dza!.