The Contemporary Legacy of Giya Kancheli

The Contemporary Legacy of Giya Kancheli

This classical playlist comprises 9 symphonies of the Contemporary artist - Giya Kancheli. The melodies talk about youthful idealism and adult cynicism. The artist has also dedicated some of his soundtracks to his long-lost memories of his parents and childhood. After listening to these symphonies, one can figure out that the musician had a keen interest in jazz as well. Although jazz, at that time, was regarded as a dangerous and degenerate western form of art. However, these symphonies speak volumes and talk a lot about humankind and the relationships we create with our surroundings.

Giya was a musician from Georgia. He was born in the Georgian capital of Tbilisi but raised in Belgium.

Kancheli moved to Berlin after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, then to Antwerp in 1995, where he became a songwriter for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic. At the age of 84, he died in his hometown of Tbilisi.

Kancheli's style of music in his sonatas is usually slow snippets of minor-mode rhythm set against long, depressed, despondent string discords. Kancheli was described by Rodion Shchedrin as an ascetic with a futurist temperament; a constrained Vesuvius. Kancheli composed seven symphonies as well as Mourned by the Wind, a cello and orchestra sacraments.

His Fourth Symphony was premiered in the United States in Feb 1978, with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Yuri Temirkanov, just before the social freeze in the United States toward Soviet society.

Kancheli's visibility was restored as a result of the glasnost, and he started to receive regular

performances. Kancheli's works were premiered in Atlanta and with the Philharmonic Orchestra under Kurt Masur, and also by Lera Auerbach, D. Russell Davies, Gidon Kremer, K. Kashkashian, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Kronos Quartet. He proceeded to be paid on a regular basis. His recent developments are routinely documented, most prominently on The ECM chart.

In the southwest, his music was mostly discovered through records, especially those released by the Munich-based CD label ECM Remastered Edition, which started in 1992 with the release of Kim Kashkashian's grippingly ethereal Vom Winde Beweint (Mourned by the Wind, 1989), a ceremony for viola and ensemble conducted by Dennis Russell Davies. Kancheli's music moved away from philosophical level like symphony, chamber orchestra, and string quartet in favour of freer styles of representational names. Kancheli liked to merge voices and individual organs, as in the cycle of concerto-like pieces of the 1990s, despite the fact that he only wrote one piece, the two-act Music for the Living.

Between 1930 and 1995, he composed a large series of spiritual works in various forms with – mainly – ambient orchestral composition, collectively labeled Life Without Christmas, beginning with Prayer Services (with taped boy's voice, 1990), the cantatas Afternoon Prayers (with soprano and clarinet, 1990), and Nighttime Prayers (with alto singers).