Anton Batagov
Anton Batagov is a Russian composer and pianist who works in minimalist and postminimalist styles. His music combines classical, rock, ethnic, and religious elements. By 2020, his discography included about 50 albums, and his works had been performed by the Ural Philharmonic Orchestra, the State Svetlanov Symphony Orchestra, and musicAeterna.
Born in Moscow on October 10, 1965, Batagov graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1988, where he studied piano with Tatiana Nikolayeva. In 1986, he received a special prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. A live recording from the competition began his collaboration with the Melodiya label. In the 1980s, he promoted Russian music abroad and international music in Russia, and was the first performer in Russia of works by John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich.
From 1989 to 1996, Batagov was artistic director of the Alternative festival. His 1990 debut album for Melodiya featured Olivier Messiaen’s Twenty Looks at the Infant Jesus. His recording of Bach’s The Art of Fugue also drew praise. In the early 1990s, he wrote title music for NTV, worked with texts by Russian Futurist and OBERIU writers, and spent several years working with the Kultura television channel. His first solo album of original music, I Looked at the Green Trees for a Long Time, appeared in 1993. He also wrote the soundtrack for Ivan Dykhovichny’s 1995 film Music for December.
Batagov paused his concert career in 1997 and returned to performing in 2009, incorporating meditation and religious and philosophical perspectives into his work. His first concert after returning took place in Seattle, where he performed his own compositions. He later appeared at the Diaghilev Festival in Perm, including with his own piano cycle Selected Letters of Sergei Rachmaninoff, premiered in 2013. That year he released Tayatha, a postminimalist collaboration with Tibetan singer Yungchen Lhamo; New York Public Radio included it among the year’s ten best contemporary classical releases.
His later work spans solo piano, vocal and orchestral music, rock-influenced compositions, and film and television scores. Notable projects include the vocal cycle I Fear No More, based on John Donne’s verse sermons; the rock cantata The One Thus Gone, which combines rock techniques with Buddhist texts; and the song cycle Optical Illusion, setting poems by Alexander Pushkin and Daniil Kharms. In 2018, he and conductor Teodor Currentzis presented Slow with musicAeterna, a program of slow movements from concertos by Bach, Mozart, Haydn, Ravel, Grieg, and Rachmaninoff. Batagov also continued his work with choreographer Lucinda Childs.
Melodiya released several of Batagov’s recordings in the 2020s, including his performances of Debussy’s preludes and his album Well-Meditated Clavier (2023), recorded on a 1909 Steinway piano that had belonged to pianist Nikolai Petrov. Later releases included Tat Tvam Asi (2024), Ocean of Samsara (2024), Bobéobi (2025), and Well-Meditated Clavier, Volume 2 (2026). In 2025, the label Evidence Classics released a live album of seven works by Johann Pachelbel, performed in Princeton.