Anatoly Zatin
Anatoly Zatin is a composer, pianist, conductor, and teacher. He was born in Uzhhorod, in the Soviet Union, on March 23, 1954, and became a Mexican citizen in 1996. He began studying music at age three and won first prize at a young composers and pianists competition in Kyiv in 1968.
Zatin graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory in composition and orchestral conducting in 1977 and in piano in 1979, then completed postgraduate study in composition in 1983. His teachers included Sergei Slonimsky in composition, Ravil Martynov and Alexander Lukashavichus in conducting, and Yuri Ananyev, Pavel Serebryakov, and A. Logovinsky in piano. He made his conducting debut with the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeny Mravinsky.
In 1979, Zatin won second prize at the Sergei Prokofiev Competition in Leningrad. He taught composition, orchestration, and chamber music at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1981 to 1983. In 1990–1992, he served as artistic director and chief conductor of the Yekaterinburg Musical Comedy Theatre and the B-A-C-H Chamber Orchestra. He received the UNICEF Honorary Medal in 1990 for his work as a pianist and conductor.
Zatin has lived and worked in Mexico since 1992. He taught at the University of Guadalajara from 1992 to 2001 and founded the AIMAZ music academy in Guadalajara in 1996. From 2001, he was a professor at the University of Colima, where he led the music faculty from 2001 to 2011 and served as dean of the Institute of Fine Arts from 2011 to 2016. In 2003, he founded the piano duo Duo Petrof with pianist Vlada Vasilyeva, his former student. He was named a Petrof Artist in 2008 and received the Mozart Medal in 2015 for his contribution to musical art. In 2024, Duo Petrof toured Europe, including performances in Prague and at the Cortot Hall in Paris.
His works include concertos for horn, trumpet, and piano; flute, harpsichord, and orchestra; and trumpet, piano, and strings, as well as a piano-and-orchestra rhapsody on themes by Nino Rota. His stage works include the musical scenes The Carefree Citizen (1985), the comic opera Nightmares of the Kherson Governorate (1987), and the musical play Love Until Death (1990). His other compositions include two piano sonatas, the fantasy Paganini in Six Etudes, a symphony, chamber music, and arrangements for piano duos.