Yuri Abdokov
Yuri Abdokov is a Russian composer and teacher, born on 20 March 1967 in Cherkessk, Stavropol Krai. He is a professor at the Moscow Conservatory, holds a Candidate of Arts degree, and was named People's Artist of the Karachay-Cherkess Republic in 2025.
Abdokov received his academic musical education at the Gnesins Russian Academy of Music, graduating in 1992 in composition and orchestration under Nikolai Peyko. He completed postgraduate studies in composition and orchestration with Boris Tchaikovsky in 1994, and began teaching composition at the academy while still Tchaikovsky's postgraduate student.
His major works include the operas Rembrandt, after a play by Dmitry Kedrin, and The Light-Handed Woman, based on an ancient Caucasian legend; the ballets Autumn Sketches, Secret Barriers, and Architecture of Sound—Three Poems; three symphonies; five string quartets; and a Piano Quintet. His orchestral works include Autumn Prayers, On the Edge of Thaw and Ice, Birds in the Rain, and Beautiful Are the Faces of the Sleeping, an elegiac poem for violin and orchestra. He has also written music for ensembles, piano, organ, cello, harpsichord, viola d'amore and chorus, as well as numerous orchestrations and reconstructions of early music. His ballet Other People's Shadows was staged by Ángel Corella's Corella Ballet in Spain. The world premiere of his Choral Postlude for Viola and Orchestra in Memory of Rudolf Barshai took place at Berlin's Konzerthaus during the Young Euro Classic festival in August 2016.
Abdokov orchestrated Boris Tchaikovsky's unfinished Prelude-Bells for large symphony orchestra in 1996; its posthumous premiere was given at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory in 2003. He has served as artistic director of first performances and first recordings of works by Mieczysław Weinberg, Boris Tchaikovsky, Nikolai Peyko and Georgy Sviridov. He edited previously unpublished compositions by his teachers, including Boris Tchaikovsky's early quartets, the opera The Star, From Kipling, and Marches for Wind Orchestra, as well as Peyko's Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. He has been artistic director and producer of more than ten compact discs of rare Russian music, including the Grammy-nominated album Balakirev and Russian Folk Song.
Since 1996, Abdokov has taught at the Moscow Conservatory's composition faculty, leading individual classes in composition and orchestration and teaching the history of orchestral styles. He created Russia's first conservatory course in the theory of orchestral writing for postgraduate composition and opera-symphonic conducting students. From 2000 to 2007 he headed the composition department that he founded at the Viktor Popov Academy of Choral Art. From 2000 to 2016 he was also a professor at the Moscow State Academy of Choreography, where he developed courses in musical dramaturgy, composition and orchestration for choreographers and postgraduate students. He leads masterclasses for young composers, conductors and choreographers, and directs the International Creative Workshop Terra Musika for composers, opera-symphonic conductors and choreographers in Russia, Germany and Italy.
He has written more than 100 scholarly works, essays, articles and annotations on composition, orchestration, orchestral styles and choreography. His books include The Musical Poetics of Choreography: A Composer's View (2009) and Nikolai Peyko: “Having Fulfilled His Mystery...” (2020). His score for the 2008 animated film Little Angel, directed by Z. Bideeva, received the Golden Knight award. His distinctions also include the title Honoured Artist of Karachay-Cherkessia, awarded in 2003, and the Golden Pegasus, a Caucasian public award, in 2008.