Giya Kancheli obituary (original) (raw)

The audience trooped across a moonlit Salisbury Plain, past the deserted thatched cottages and into the 13th-century St Giles’ Church. The village of Imber, which since 1943 has been used for urban warfare training, is off-limits most of the year. However, in August 2003 an organisation called Artangel, which puts on artistic events in unusual locations, had secured permission to stage three remarkable performances there.

At their centre was a performance of Little Imber, a profoundly melancholic 35-minute work for choir, soloist and ensemble written by Giya Kancheli, himself an exile. To some it was a lament for a village lost; others regarded it as a faux-baroque piece of saccharine choral writing. Either way, it was in keeping with Kancheli’s style of “holy minimalism”, a label that often found him associated with composers such as Henryk Gorecki, Arvo Pärt and John Tavener.

Asked by the BBC about the concept behind Little Imber, Kancheli quoted Dostoevsky: “There is this saying that beauty will save the world. But who will save beauty? I think when you sit down at the piano and write music you are trying to do just that.”

Kancheli’s music could appear bleak. In his string quartet Night Prayers the music is engulfed in a rumbling whirlwind that seems to suck everything in — and then silence. The strings pluck out a very slow tango; a violin purrs sweet and high; and a cello scrapes, soft but menacing. From the maelstrom the voice of a boy soprano emerges singing slowly: “Lord, hear my voice, Lord.” His music often uses a huge dynamic range which, he claimed, was so that “when the listener starts falling asleep, I wake him up”. Asked for a more serious explanation he replied: “In every joke, there is a grain of truth.”

Giya Alexandrovich Kancheli was born in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia, in 1935, the son of Alexander and Agnessa, to whose memory he dedicated his Symphony No 5 (1977). His heart was set on being a geologist, but as a 19-year-old student he changed his mind. “My first expedition was a 12-mile walk in 95-degree heat, carrying a very heavy load,” he told The Boston Globe in 1994. “When I got back that evening, I drew up a list of professions that would not require much walking. High up on the list was ‘musician’. ”

He studied composition with Iona Tuskiya at the Tbilisi conservatoire and was soon composing scores for the Georgian cinema, producing more than 50 soundtracks. Within two years of graduating he had decided to write the first of his seven symphonies. “Where I get such impudence, I don’t know,” he said.

By the early 1960s Kancheli was making musical forays into the tightly knit circle of composers across the Soviet Union. “These were difficult times, but they were good times too,” he recalled, although they had no knowledge of developments in the West. “The thaw started in the 1960s, and we learnt about the existence of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, and the other composers, the avant-garde,” he said.

He returned to the conservatoire as a teacher in 1970 and the next year was appointed music director of the Rustaveli Theatre, Tbilisi. Meanwhile, in 1967 he had married Liulia Valentina, a musicologist. She survives him with a son and a daughter, who would translate for him.

By the time of his Second Symphony (1970) Kancheli had stopped dividing his works into traditional movements. Vom Winde Beweint (Mourned by the Wind; 1984), a 40-minute viola piece for Yuri Bashmet consisted of four such movements, “but I always ask the conductor not to put his arms down during the pause in order not to give the audience a chance to cough, blow their noses and so on,” he said. He also wrote pieces for the cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, the violinist Gidon Kremer and the jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek.

After the fall of communism Kancheli moved to Berlin, where on one wall of his sparsely decorated apartment was a large piece of plain white card bearing in black lettering the words “banana republic”: “My homeland,” he told Gramophone magazine. When a new regime took power in Georgia he remained in Germany, where he had to make ends meet: “At first I wrote only symphonic music. Now I have to write in other forms, solo works, chamber music.”

Later he lived in Antwerp, although in recent years he returned regularly to Georgia. Despite his regular absences from Tbilisi, one critic described how “traces of Georgian folk music continued to float like oil in the structural waters of his music without ever sounding dewy-eyed, whimsical or nostalgic”.

Sometimes there were other reasons for the sorrowful nature of his music. In 1998 he wrote Piano Quartet in L’istesso Tempo for an ensemble based in Seattle, northwest United States. “The piece could be especially sad because I knew I had to fly to the premiere and wouldn’t be able to smoke during the flight,” he said. “For me, it was a tragedy.”

Giya Kancheli, composer, was born on August 10, 1935. He died from a heart condition on October 2, 2019, aged 84