Andrey Mikita

Andrey Mikita is a Soviet and Russian composer, pianist, and musical public figure, born on 28 January 1959 in Leningrad. He is a member of the board of the Union of Moscow Composers. His father, Istvan Mikita, was a choral conductor of Hungarian ethnicity, and his mother, Inga Boyarinova, was a journalist.

He studied at the Leningrad Conservatory and then at the Moscow Conservatory. His piano teachers included Tatyana Rumshevich, Natan Perelman, Stanislav Neuhaus, and Yevgeny Malinin, while his composition teachers included Yuri Simakin, Boris Tishchenko, Tatyana Chudova, Alexander Tchaikovsky, and Tikhon Khrennikov. He later became professor at the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory, professor at the Gnessin Russian Academy of Music, and professor at Kurashiki Sakuyo University in Japan.

Mikita is best known as the author of cantatas, oratorios, instrumental concertos, and choral concertos. He also wrote extensively for piano and for Russian folk instruments, especially the gusli. A major focus of his work is sacred music. He described his own musical direction as “sacral romanticism.”

Among his notable works is the ballet The Ugly Duckling, written in the early 1980s in collaboration with Olga Petrova and Irina Tseslyukevich; it was performed for many years at the Mikhailovsky Theatre and staged in Kyiv and Omsk. His sacred concerto Bogorodichnye pesnopeniya was composed in the late 1990s on liturgical texts devoted to major feasts of the Mother of God. A chant dedicated to Saint Tatiana has been performed regularly every Sunday at the Church of Saint Tatiana at Moscow State University since 2000.

His later major compositions include the concert fantasy Romeo and Juliet for cello and orchestra, based on music from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s overture; the oratorio Seven Songs about God, premiered in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 2012; Hymn to the Nativity of Christ, first performed in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2014; the cantata Prince Vladimir, premiered in 2015 at the Orthodox singing festival on Valaam; the oratorio Siberian Land, premiered in 2018 in Kemerovo; the hymn Utverdi, Bozhe for three choirs, soloist quintet, deacon’s monody, and bells, written for the tenth anniversary of Patriarch Kirill’s enthronement in 2019; and the Christmas Cantata, first heard in 2020 in Yaroslavl. In 2020 he received a prize at the Third All-Russian AVANTI Competition for Jesum autem flagellatum for mixed choir and organ.

Mikita also collaborated repeatedly with jazz musicians Andrey Ivanov and Mikhail Ivanov. Together they wrote the symphonic-jazz fantasy Tuileries in Blue Tones on themes from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as Polovtsian Rhapsody on themes by Borodin, Dave Brubeck, and Paul Desmond. In addition, Andrey Ivanov performed Mikita’s work Next Spring for solo double bass and symphony orchestra.

In public musical life, Mikita initiated the creation of the composers’ association MOST (Musical Association “Contemporary Tradition”) in 2007 and serves as its chairman. The group was conceived as a bridge between academic composers, performers, listeners, Russian classics, and contemporary composers. The association organizes concerts, including events at the Moscow Philharmonic, and Mikita acts as the author of programs and regular presenter of this subscription series.

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