Artemov composer biography

Having a technical education in luggage, he unexpectedly decided to check the harmony for everyone and successfully graduated from the Moscow Conservatory. And although you, perhaps, can not be said about his music - it is mostly well -owned, expressive and even sometimes beautiful. Nevertheless, for a long time he was considered a dangerous innovator, a modernist and dissident, along with Schnitsky, Gubaidulina, Denisov, Karetnikov and other authors who professed the latest avant -garde styles and techniques prohibited in the USSR, that is, he was completely unreliable from the point of view of the official Soviet musical authorities.

And only at the end of the perestroika he was recognized as a genius, the forerunner and the discoverer of new artistic ways and sound worlds, as, indeed, many of the above his colleagues. He was born in Moscow exactly a year before the start of the Great Patriotic War in a family of musicians, but did not immediately go through the parental path, entering the department of Moscow University after school, which later affected his art views.

However, the craving for music still prevails, and the young man finishes the school at the conservatory, where he is then studying with Nikolai Sidelnikov, from which composers unlike each other, such as Artemyev, Smirnov, Tarnopolov, Minkov, Sokolov and others, came out. Artyomov is also looking for his original, unique language, designed to convey his peculiar creative ideas, which is based on the spiritual component of art.

Music for him is, first of all, the disclosure of the depths of the human spirit, as inexhaustible as cosmos and universe. She brings with her an insight that allows you to penetrate the secrets of being and the entire universe, which is very close to the categorical imperative of Kant - "the starry sky above us and the moral law within us." Such a cosmological concept comes from romantics with their support on mythology, primarily Wagner, as well as from Scriabin, Vraser, Messiana and, in many ways, from folklore.

In these views, the composer’s scientific and philosophical approach to his own creativity was reflected. But such principles were very far from socialist realism - the main direction in Soviet art. Artemov’s works for almost 20 years remain incomprehensible top of the composer community, are not published and practically not performed. In the year, at the VI Congress of the Union of Composers, his music is sharply criticized, and he falls into the so -called “Khrennikovskaya seven” - the “black list” of seven prohibited domestic composers, which also included Denisov, Gubaidulin, Suslin and other disgraced authors.

To the honor of the chairman of the musical organization Khrennikov, he will later change his attitude to the younger colleague and even put him on a par with Mozart and Verdi. But this will happen already in the midst of perestroika, when Artemov’s music is widely sounded not only abroad, but also in his homeland. One of the turning points in this regard is the premiere in the Moscow Hall named after the Tchaikovsky Main Artyomovsky essay “Requiem” dedicated to the “martyrs of long -suffering Russia”.

In terms of its scale and social significance, the appearance of this musical masterpiece can be compared with the canvases of Ilya Glazunov “Eternal Russia” and “Mystery of the twentieth century”, which were just first shown at the artist’s personal exhibition in Moscow. According to the fateful coincidence, the execution of this tragic composition coincided with the largest natural disaster in the end of the 10ths in the USSR - an earthquake in Spitak, which happened only a few days later.

So the Requiem of Artemov also became a mourning Messa for those who died in Armenia. It is no coincidence that he was performed again in the year at the evening in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, dedicated to the flying of the genocide of the Armenian people during the 1st World War. This work, like many others, can be found on numerous gramplasts and CDs that have been published in recent decades in the USA, England, Germany and Russia.

The notes of his symphonies, concerts, chamber and vocal works included there. The text is Anatoly Lysenkov.