Pyotr Meshchaninov
Pyotr Meshchaninov (9 July 1944 – 18 November 2006) was a Russian pianist and music theorist. Born in Moscow, he was the son of the painter Nikolai Meshchaninov and Olga Lyudevig. He specialized as a performer in 20th-century music and was an advocate of the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, whom he married in 1991.
Meshchaninov studied at the Merzlyakov School and graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1968, having studied piano with Dmitry Blagoy. From 1968 to 1991 he was a pianist with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. He frequently appeared with orchestras conducted by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, including as the first performer of Vyacheslav Artyomov's Concerto of Thirteen in 1977.
He was a founder and active participant in the Moscow Experimental Studio of Electronic Music from 1967 until the late 1970s, where he experimented with the ANS synthesizer. In 1976 he conducted the premiere of Gubaidulina's Concerto for Bassoon and Low Strings, and later conducted her works Concordanza, Quatro, The Lyre of Orpheus concerto in 2001, and Music for Flute, Strings and Percussion. From 1991 he lived in Germany while retaining Russian citizenship.
From the late 1960s Meshchaninov developed an original account of the development of pitch systems, which he called the “evolutionary elementary theory of music.” He applied properties of numbers, described as the growth of numerical fields, to the evolution of harmony in European music from antiquity to the 20th century. In the 1990s, prompted by his study of Fibonacci numbers, he expanded the theory to interpret the historical development of musical form and rhythm. His ideas were presented in lectures in Moscow, beginning in 1969, and in several German cities during the 1990s; they also influenced Gubaidulina's compositional technique and aesthetics.
His recordings include Alexander Scriabin's Prometheus and Andrei Eshpai's Concerto Grosso with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra under Yevgeny Svetlanov; Olivier Messiaen's Exotic Birds and Camille Saint-Saëns's Wedding Cake with Rozhdestvensky's orchestra; Alfred Schnittke's Stream, realized on the ANS synthesizer in 1969; and Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, performed in 1986 with Ivan Monighetti, Leonid Mikhaylov and Liana Isakadze. His scholarly writings and lecture transcripts are held, unpublished, in the archives of the Moscow Conservatory. He was buried in Khovanskoye Central Cemetery.
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