Vladimir Dashkevich is a Soviet and Russian composer and music theorist. He was born on 20 January 1934 in Moscow. He is the author of nine symphonies, three operas, five musicals, five instrumental concertos, music for more than 30 stage productions and about 90 films, as well as numerous chamber, programme and vocal works.
During the 1950s, Dashkevich studied at the Moscow Institute of Fine Chemical Technology and qualified as a chemical engineer. While working in that profession, he attended a seminar for amateur composers and studied with Filipp Gershkovich and Nikolai Karetnikov. In 1962 he completed a second higher-education degree at the Gnesin Musical Pedagogical Institute, where he studied in Aram Khachaturian's class. He became a member of the Union of Composers of the USSR in 1965, chaired the Moscow Union of Composers from 1991 to 1993, and has served as chairman of the executive committee of the International Association of Composers' Organizations since 1993.
His concert works include Symphony No. 1 and the oratorio Faust (both 1964), the Cello Concerto (1973), the opera The Bedbug (1980), Symphony No. 4, Requiem, to poems by Anna Akhmatova (1988), Symphony No. 5, Preserve My Speech, to words by Osip Mandelstam (1989), Kolyma Requiem for chorus and orchestra (1990), the Violin Concerto (2003), Piano Concerto (2007), and the operas The Government Inspector (2007) and The Twelve (2014), for which he wrote his own libretto after poems by Alexander Blok. He also wrote vocal cycles to poetry by Blok, Vladimir Mayakovsky and Mandelstam, and collaborated with Yelena Kamburova on cycles based on poems by Silver Age poets.
Dashkevich worked extensively in film. A musical theme first heard in the 1973 film A Drop in the Sea became the signature music of the television programme Visiting a Fairy Tale; it was later used in episodes of Yeralash and in the 1982 film There, on Unknown Paths.... From 1979 to 1986 he wrote music for the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson film cycle, and his principal theme for Heart of a Dog (1988) also became widely known. He was the composer for the television programme Gentleman Show from 1996 to 2008.
His awards include the Soviet Screen magazine prize for the music to Winter Cherry (1986), the USSR State Prize for the music to The Servant (1991), Nika Awards for The Thief (1998) and Three Sisters (2018), and the M. Tariverdiev Prize at Kinotavr for The Circus Burned Down, and the Clowns Fled (1998). He was named Honored Artist of the Russian Federation in 2002 and received the Literature and Cinema Russian Film Festival prize for best music in 2008 for From Nowhere with Love, or Merry Funerals.