The music and personality of GIYA KANCHELI are familiar to audiences in Bulgaria both from concert performances of his works, from Georgi Danelia’s films, such as Don’t Grieve, Kin-dza-dza, Mimino among others, and from his visits in the country – the most recent was in 2013, on the occasion of the first Sofia performance of Styx on the celebration of the sixtieth anniversary of Yuri Bashmet. Georgia’s most renowned composer is universally recognized as one of the most exciting creative personalities in the musical culture of our time. Great Italian composer Luigi Nono, one of the leading figures of the post-war music avantgarde, described him as „a colossal musical talent, occupying an absolutely original position internationally”, whereas to Rodion Schedrin he is „an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist and the restraint of a silent Vesuvius”. The uniqueness of his distinctive style perhaps lays in the combination of deep contact with tradition and spirituality, and a modern worldview, acutely responsive to most topical situations – such as events, issues, artistic aesthetics; in the combination a lyrical melodicism and unusually innovative composing idiom; in his personal conception of musical time with extended spatiality where thought moves calmly between the poles of epic and dramatic, lyric and tragic, philosophical introversion and quiet prayer.

Kancheli is an author whose creative output in all genres commands respect – seven symphonies, numerous orchestral works with program titles (many of them with various solo instruments), chamber and solo instrumental music, a long number of works  for  voice  and orchestra. He has also composed music for over forty films (the most recent  one  –  Hostages  –  appeared  in the autumn of 2017), which have gained broad popularity. In the two decades between 1971 and 1991, when he served as a Musical Director at the Shota Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi, he began his collaboration with director Robert Sturua, writing music for his stage productions. But his over twenty opuses of theatrical music also include such as were written for  productions in Moscow, Leningrad, Kiev, Tel-Aviv, Buenos Aires, Greece… In collaboration with Sturua he composed his only opera Music for the Living, praised as an event in the musical theatre when it was staged in 1984 and when it was restaged in 1999 at the Deutsches Theater in Weimar.

In 1991 Kancheli left for Berlin with a scholarship of the German Academy of Arts, and since 1995 he settled in Antwerp, invited as a resident composer of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestra. The international popularity of his music was  championed  by  such talented performers as Dennis Russell Davies, Jansug Kakhidze, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet,  and  the Kronos Quartet. His works were premiered by the likes of Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic and Yuri Temirkanov with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra. They can be heard at large festivals of contemporary music. Giya Kancheli continues even to date to receive commissions from Europe and America, his recent works are being regularly released on compact discs, notably for the ECM (Edition of Contemporary Music), as well as for Telarc and other labels.