Andrei Volkonsky

Andrei Volkonsky was a Soviet composer, harpsichordist, and organist. He was born on February 14, 1933, in Geneva, Switzerland, into a family of Russian émigrés belonging to the princely Volkonsky line, and he died on September 16, 2008, in Aix-en-Provence, France.

He began improvising at the piano at the age of five and, as a child, played his improvisations for Rachmaninoff. He studied with Dinu Lipatti and then, in 1944–1945, at the Geneva Conservatory with Johnny Aubert. After moving with his parents to Paris in 1946, he studied for a year at the Russian Conservatory there.

In 1947 his family repatriated to the Soviet Union and his parents were allowed to settle in Tambov. Volkonsky meanwhile lived for a time in Moscow, where he entered the final year of the music school attached to the Moscow Conservatory, studying composition with E. I. Messner and piano with V. S. Belov; he graduated in 1949. He soon moved to Tambov to join his parents and completed music college there. From 1950 to 1954 he studied at the Moscow Conservatory in the faculty of music theory and composition in the class of Yuri Shaporin, but was expelled because of unsatisfactory marks in Marxism-Leninism. In 1955 he was admitted to the Union of Soviet Composers.

That same year, together with Rudolf Barshai, he took part in creating the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, in which he played harpsichord and organ until 1957. From 1956 he also appeared as a solo harpsichordist, becoming one of the pioneers of historically informed performance in Russia. In 1962 his works were officially banned in the Soviet Union and were no longer performed, after which he concentrated on performance while continuing to compose privately. In 1965 he founded the early music ensemble Madrigal, with which he toured throughout the Soviet Union; in 1969 he took part in the Prague Spring festival, and in 1970 he toured cities in East Germany as well as Romania and Poland.

Volkonsky also worked extensively for film, radio, and theater. In 1968 he wrote the music for Algimantas Vidugiris's short poetic film Castles on Sand, which achieved great success and brought a record number of prizes for the Kyrgyzfilm studio. His selected concert works include piano, chamber, choral, orchestral, and vocal compositions from the late 1940s onward, among them Musica stricta, Music for 12 Instruments, Suite of Mirrors, The Knots of Time, Maqam, Immobile, Psalm 148, and Carrefour. He also wrote a music-theoretical work, Fundamentals of Temperament, published in Moscow in 1996 and reissued in revised form in 2003.

In May 1973 Volkonsky emigrated to the West. He first lived in Geneva, then in 1974 settled at the artistic center Bahnhof Rolandseck near Bonn, moved to Paris in 1975, spent half a year in Berlin in 1977 as a fellow of the DAAD Berlin artist-support program, later that same year lived in Florence, and in the summer of 1978 returned to Geneva. From 1979 to 1983 he performed with the violinist and viola d'amore player Daniel Fradkin. In 1981 he founded the early music ensemble Hoc Opus in Geneva.

In 1988 he settled permanently in Aix-en-Provence in southern France. After his death there in 2008, funeral services with an Orthodox priest and a choir from Nice were held on September 21, and burial followed on September 22. In accordance with his wishes, he was buried in the vault of the princely Volkonsky family at the cemetery in Menton, a town near the Italian border that he loved greatly.

Yuri Kholopov later described Volkonsky as standing at the spearhead of the movement that transformed Russian music in the second half of the twentieth century. The article presents him as an initiating figure among the talented young composers who helped reshape that musical landscape.

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This figure has 1 connection in the Music Lineage catalog.