Gia Kancheli: my attitude to Armenia is somehow arithmetical

PanARMENIAN.Net - Days of Gia Kancheli, a renowned Georgian composer, are being held in Armenia.



"My attitude to Armenia is somehow arithmetical. I have 7 symphonies, 6 of which I composed in the House of Composers in Dilijan," he told a news conference in Yerevan today. "Each symphony took 2 or 3 years. If you make a calculation, you will see that I spent 15 years in Armenia."



"I am confident that Days of Gia Kancheli will be a gift for those who appreciate the talent and sensuality of this great composer," said Hasmik Poghosyan, Armenian Minister of Culture.



Gia Kancheli born 10 August 1935 in Tbilisi is a Georgian composer resident in Belgium. Kancheli is his country's most famous living composer and arguably its best-known cultural expert. His music is very communicative and immediate.



In 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.



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.



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 in January 1978. His Sixth Symphony is considered by many to be his most notable work to date. His Seventh Symphony was emphatically subtitled 'Epilogue' and he is unlikely to write any more named symphonies, but he has described his orchestral work "Trauerfarbenes Land" ('The Land Stained with Mourning') as "almost an Eighth Symphony".



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 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!