Vladimir Tarnopolski

Russian composer (born 1955)

Vladimir Grigoryevich Tarnopolski (Влади́мир Григо́рьевич Тарнопо́льский, born April 30, 1955, in Dnipro, Ukrainian SSR) is a Ukrainian composer. One of the active reformers of the musical life of Moscow of the post Soviet period, and the artistic director of large scale Russian and international musical projects the main idea of which was overcoming the cultural self isolation and the integration of Russian music into the overall European and world cultural context.

The composer has written music since childhood, having mastered the bases of composition independently. After his studies at the Dnepropetrovsk Glinka Music College (1970–1973) majoring in piano (studying with Mikaela Alexandrova) and music theory, he studied composition at the Moscow State Conservatory with Nikolai Sidelnikov and the theoretical disciplines of harmony, form and counterpoint with Yuri Kholopov (1973–1980). A special role in Tarnopolski’s compositional development has been played by Edison Denisov, who gave him the first professional advice and recommendations, first by correspondence, and then at the Conservatory he became his teacher of orchestration, at the same time, having preserved a certain amount of influence in the sphere of musical composition, as well. During his student years, Tarnopolski entered the so called “Denisov circle” of composers, who assumed an alternative position in regard to the official standards of the Soviet ideology and in the late 1980s formed the active core of the artistic group of the Association of Contemporary Music No. 2. His diploma work, the Concerto for Cello and Orchestra (1980) was included by conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky into his concert cycle “From the History of Russian Music”. In 1987 in Parczew (Poland) he participated in a master class under the direction of Luigi Nono, from whom he received a warm valediction and a priceless present – the authorial score of his just completed composition No hay caminos, hay que caminar Andrej Tarkowskij (There are no paths, one must go forward to Andrei Tarkovsky, 1987). From 1981, Tarnopolski taught composition at the Moscow Ippolitov Ivanov Music College. From 1992 to April 2022 he was a professor at the Composition Department of the Moscow State P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory. Many of his students have received renown and have become prize winners in international composers’ competitions. In 2003, upon his initiative the Contemporary Music Department was established (where he was the chairman of the department until 2017), on which tutorial courses of history of new music for musicologists, analysis of contemporary scores and the most contemporary techniques for composers and performers have been developed. In April 2022 Tarnopolski moved to Germany; presently he is a visiting professor at the Hochschule fȕr Musik und Theater in Munich. He also carries out projects in other universities.

Hana Adjiashvili, Olga Bochikhina, Mikhail Buzin, Georgy Dorokhov, Orhan Gashimov, Sebastian Elikovsky Vinkler, Olga Rayeva, Anton Safronov, Alexandra Filonenko, Alla Kesselman, Vladimir Gorlinsky, Jamilia Jazylbekova, Nikolai Khrust, Balasagyn Musayev, Roman Parkhomenko, Pavel Polyakov, Felix Profos, Kirill Shirokov, Madlen Styskal, Ramazan Yunusov and many others.

Tarnopolski has participated in numerous international contemporary music festivals, including the festival Acht Brücken Köln, the “Almeida” festival in London, the Beethovenfest in Bonn, the Munich Opera Biennale, the Berliner Festwochen, the Dresdner Tage fȕr Neue Musik, the Frankfurter Musikfest der Alten Oper, the Ilhom Festival in Tashkent, the Holland Festival, the Hommage aux Russes in Paris, the Huddersfield festival, the Kara Karayev Festival in Baku, the Klangspuren (Austria), La Biennale di Venezia, Make Music Together in Boston, the Manca Festival (France/Monaco), the Mannes Festival in New York, the Schleswig Holstein Musikfest (Germany), Tage fȕr Neue Musik Zurich, the Warsaw Autumn, Wien Modern, The World Music Days of the ISCM, the New York based festival Sonic Boom, the Moscow Autumn festival, the Alternativa Festival in Moscow, “Zvyozdy belykh nochey” (Stars of the White Nights, St. Petersburg), “Drugoe prostranstvo” (Other Space, Moscow) and many others. He has been invited as a jury member to many international composers’ competitions in Russia and in other countries, including the ISCM World Music Days, Gaudeamus Music Week (Amsterdam), the Witold Lutoslawski Competition (Warsaw), the Goffredo Petrassi Festival (Italy), Gesualdo Reloaded (Italy), the “Orfey” Radio Competition (Russia), The Rivers Awards International Composition Competition (Shanghai), a number of competitions in the USA and in the countries of the former USSR, etc.

Vladimir Tarnopolski was among the initiators of the Association for Contemporary Music in Moscow (АСМ–2, 1989), a group of composers who at the time of the end of the Soviet period united together against the official Soviet aesthetics and ideology. In 1993 at the Moscow State P. I. Tchaikovsky Conservatory he founded the Center for Contemporary Music, the first of its kind in Russia, and the ensemble “Studio for New Music”, and in 1994 he initiated the “Moscow Forum” International Festival of Contemporary Music – the only festival in Russia which set as its goal not only to disclose the relevant tendencies in the development of a new aesthetics and language of the art of music, but also to interpret them in a social political discourse. During the course of 30 years, there have been festivals organized of the contemporary music of Germany, France, Italy, Austria, the Netherlands, Poland, Switzerland, which have become important events in the musical life of Russia. In these projects over 1500 Russian and world premieres of works by composers from Russia and other countries took place. Such long term projects as “The Red Wheel,” “The Unknown 20th Century Russian Music,” “Russia Germany. Chapters of the History of 20th Century Music,” “An Anthology of the Avant garde,” “Specters of Time” (contemporary French music), “Sound Liberation!”, “Europe through the Eyes of Russians, Russia through the Eyes of Europeans,” “Specter of the Future” and others received broad resonance in Russia and abroad. One of the chief directions of Tarnopolski’s curatorial work has been the revival back into the concert repertoire of the undeservedly forgotten music of the early Russian avant garde period. A number of his concerts and festivals featured sensational discoveries – premieres of compositions pertaining to the time period from the 1910s to the early 1930s, including the first Russian Chamber Symphony composed by Nikolai Roslavets (1933), previously unperformed fragments of Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera The Nose (1928), works by Nikolai Obukhov, Yefim Golyscheff, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, Arthur Lourié, Evgeny O. Gunst, Wladimir Vogel, etc. Tarnopolski is the initiator of the Piotr Jurgenson International Competition for Young Composers in Moscow (from 2001), as well as the International Competition of the Moscow Conservatory (from 2018).

Vladimir Tarnopolski’s musical compositions are frequently performed in Moscow and abroad. He has been commissioned to write compositions by the leading musical ensembles, orchestras and theaters of the world, including: the Ensemble of Soloists of the Bolshoi Theatre, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theater, the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Ensemble Modern and Ensemble Musikfabrik in Germany, the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris, the Schönberg Ensemble in the Netherlands, Klangforum Wien in Austria and many others. Premieres of his operas and works for the stage have taken place within the operatic Munich biennale, in Barbican Hall in London, at the Beethovenfest in Bonn, at the Rencontres Musicales d’Evian (France), at the Festival of Contemporary Dance in Amsterdam (the Netherlands), at the Music Festival in Bergen (Norway), at the Kara Karayev Festival in Baku, at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg, at the Konstantin Stanislavsky and Vladimir Nemirovich Danchenko Opera Theater in Moscow, at the Chamber Music Theatre under the direction of Boris Pokrovsky, etc. Tarnopolski’s music has been performed by such well known musicians as Mstislav Rostropovich, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Jurowski, Ingo Metzmacher, Silven Kamberling, Reinbert de Leeuw, Alexander Lazarev, Natalia Gutman, Jens Peter Maintz and many others. Vladimir Tarnopolski was the first Russian composer invited as a professor at the Internationale Ferienkurse fȕr Neue Musik in Darmstadt (2010). He regularly reads lectures and conducts master classes in Russia, Austria, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Poland, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, USA and other countries, including such universities as Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge and others. Tarnopolski’s musical compositions have been awarded a number of prizes, including the Dmitri Shostakovich Prize (Russia, 1991) and the Paul Hindemith Prize (Germany, 1991), International Rostrum of Composers award (2001). He has been invited as a composer in residence into the most significant institutions for contemporary art and science, among the most important of which were the Civitella Ranieri (Italy, 2015) and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin (Germany, 2017–2018). He is a member of the Saxon Academy for the Arts (Germany) and a Merited Professor of the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan.

Vladimir Tarnopolski has written several operas, as well as many orchestral, chamber and vocal compositions. He aspires to achieve in the sound of his music a “new euphony,” (a new consonance of sound), when in the emerging “sound magma the juxtapositions between consonance and dissonance, sound and noise, harmony and timbre, acoustic and electronic instruments are alleviated.” In the opinion of one of the journalists, the composer, when making use of various stylistic elements, presumes at the same time their inner self destructive criticism; “it inherently implies criticism in reference to it, and ultimately, it destroys itself. The music always creates the impression that it contemplates about its own sounds from an observation deck, at the same time, not only discerning the sonorities themselves, but also, what is more important, consciously operating with its meanings.”

In his compositions Tarnopolski frequently brings together artistic and political discourses, similarly to the way in its curatorial activities he carried this out during the course of many years.