Composers and Performers

Sergey Beltiukov is one of a group of composers who came together in 1990 to found the Belarusian Society for Contemporary Music. Along with the other founders - Galina Gorelova, Vyacheslav Kuznetzov and Dmitry Lybin among them - he has become one of the leading composers of his generation in Belarus. He has written orchestral, choral and piano works, and for film, TV and radio productions as well as the concert hall.

Born in 1956, Beltiukov studied at the Belarusian State Conservatory in Minsk, graduating in 1980 from the piano class of Grigory Sharshevsky and in 1987 from the composition class of Yevgeny Glebov. He won second prizes in the Soviet Union Students and Post-Graduate Students Composition Competition in 1985 and 1988. In 1990 he became the first Belarusian composer to be performed at the World Music Days in Oslo. The work was called "Music for Oboe and Tape."

Later work includes a symphony, "Engraving;" a cantata, "Pastorale;" a requiem, "Nenia," and a violin concerto. His compositions have been performed at numerous festivals in Europe, and in 2000 his music represented Belarus at the UNESCO International Rostrum of Composers in Amsterdam. On the 25th anniversary of his composing activities a complete concert of his works was presented at the Great Hall of the Philharmonic Society in Minsk.

Beltiukov lives in Minsk and serves as deputy director of the Culture channel of the Belarusian National State Broadcasting Company. His daughter, Dasha Beltiukova, is a professional flutist living in Amsterdam. She was the flutist in the premiere of her father's "Concerto for Four Soloists and symphony orchestra" at the Philharmonic hall in Minsk in 1999.

The Estonian composer Ulo Krigul was born on Nov. 7, 1978, in Tallinn , graduated from Tallinn Music High School in 1997 and from the Estonian Academy of Music, where he worked under he guidance of Raimo Kangro and Rene Eespere, in 2003. He went on to study with Detlev Muller-Siemens at the University for Music and Fine Arts, and returned to Estonia to receive a master's degree in composition with Tonu Korvits at the Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre.

His musical style is lively and dynamic, and shows the influence of jazz, post-minimalism and other musical means. He has a taste for what he calls "playful contrasts." At present his major compositional interest is "to treat chords and the relationship between them as geometric figures or graphic projections."

Krigul's body of work ranges from electronic music to symphony-orchestra scores, with performances at music festivals in Estonia, Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Ukraine, Finland and Sweden. He also has collaborated in film music. The feature-film "Autumn Ball" won an award at the Venice film festival in 2007. His most recent film, "The Temptations of St. Tony," was premiered at the Sundance film festival in Utah last January.

Krigul is also active as a music organizer. From 1995 to 1999 he served on the staff of the international jazz festival Jazzkaar in Tallinn . In 2001 and 2002 he was the artistic director of the Autumn Festival of the Estonian Academy of Music, which he founded with another young composer, Timo Steiner, in 1999. From 2000 to 2004 he was engaged as the producer of the Estonian Music Days Festival, and has since served as one of its artistic directors. He is also a keyboard player and the arranger for many rock and jazz ensembles. At present he plays keyboard in the blues band called Compromise Blue.

The composer comes from musical family. His father is a professional choir-singer and his mother is a music teacher. His wife Ulla Krigul is an organist. And his brother Vambola Krigul is a percussionist in the Estonian State Symphony Orchestra.

Zibuokle Martinaityte (pronounced zhih-BWAH-cleh marteen-ay-TEE-teh) was born on May 4, 1973, in St. Petersburg, Russia, to Lithuanian parents and developed a passion for singing in childhood. She studied at a school for musically gifted children in Kaunas, Lithuania, focusing on the piano, and turned to composing at 13. She wrote her first orchestral piece at 18.

After composition studies at the Lithuanian Academy of Music in the 1990's she won scholarships to participate in new-music courses in Germany and Austria, where her teachers were Boguslaw Scaffer, Helmut Lachermann and Marek Choloniewski. Subsequently, as interest grew in new technologies applied to musical composition, she studied at the Ircam/Centre Acanthes in Avignon, and in Royaumont, France, with Brian Ferneyhough, Magnus Lindberg and Jonathan Harvey. Subsequent residencies have taken her to Germany and the United States, where she now lives, half the year, in New York City with her American husband, the composer True Rosaschi. The rest of the year the couple lives in Vilnius.

Her musical compositions reflect an interest in an unusual combination of instruments. A piece called "Driving Force" was written for trombone, tenor saxophone and accordion. Another work, "Perpetual Pulsing Transience" is composed for six accordions, five saxophones, wind orchestra, percussion, piano and strings. Her most recent work for symphony orchestra, "A Thousand Doors to the World," written in 2009, was commissioned by Lithuanian Radio and broadcast throughout Europe.

In 2008 a work for chamber orchestra called "Polarities" was given its world premiere at the MATA festival in Brooklyn by The Knight Chamber Orchestra. "Completely Embraced by the Beauty of Emptiness," on the New Paths in Music program, had its world premiere in 2006 by the ERGO Ensemble in Toronto.

Yuri Yakovych Ishchenko, was born in Kherson, Ukraine, in 1938. He studied music there and later at the Kiev Conservatory, now the National Music Academy of Ukraine, graduating in 1960. His composition teachers were Amdriy Shtoharenko and Boris Lyatoshynsky. He recived a Ph.D. in 1977 for a thesis called "Toner color dramaturgy in B. Lyatochynsky's symphonies."

Since 1964 Ishchenko has taught composition and orchestration at the National Music Academy. Many of his pupils became composers. He cites Alla Zagaykevich, Vladimir Runchak, Boryslav Stron'ko, and Vadim Zhurovitsky, and younger composers such as Alexander Shymko, Viktoria Gavryk, Alexey Voytenko and Vitalij Vyshynsky.

His open output over the years includes six symphonies, 14 string quartets, six piano sonatas, nine violin sonatas, and three operas based on Anton Chekov stories. He has also written many chamber, vocal and choral works. His compositional style is mainly based on the traditions of classical and romantic music, although he says he has been "open to many trends of the 20th century."

In his homeland Ishchenko's music has had numerous performances, but only one CD listed on the Amazon website contains one of his works. This is a CD called Ukrainian Cello on the Dorian Discovery label. The cellist is Julia Pantelyat. A live recording was made by the violinist Cory Gemmell and the pianist Maria Dolnycky of his Sonata No. 6, "In Modo Classical," and can be heard on You Tube. It is a lighthearted, spirited work, indicative of the composer's neoclassical style.

Ishchenko lives in Kiev with his wife, Yelena, a pediatrician. Their daughter, Nadezhda, is a musicologist and teacher at the National Music Academy.

Inspired by the musical avant-garde in the former Soviet Union, Alexander Shchetynsky developed a personal post-serial style, according to the commentator Virko Baley. Inspired by such composers as Schnittke, Part, Messiaen and Ligeti, Baley says, he is now moving toward a post-modern aesthetics that "integrates stylistic elements of various epochs," Baley says.

Born in 1960, Shchetynsky graduated from the Kharkov Art Institute and taught music classes there for several years. Finding himself at odds with the conservative musical taste in the department, he stopped teaching and since 1995 has made his living as a freelance composer. He regularly organizes concerts of contemporary music and tries to spread information abroad about Ukrainian music through lectures, master classes and personal contacts. He has been a key collaborator in the annual "Contrasts" festival of contemporary music in the city of Lviv. He himself lives in Kiev.

Shchetynsky has produced compositions in many forms -- chamber works, orchestral music, choral pieces, operas and pieces for solo instruments. There have been performances by Helikon-Opera in Moscow, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Moscow Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Arditti Quartet and Continuum in New York City. Naxos is scheduled to release a CD called "New Sacred Music From Ukraine" in 2011 that will contain what the composer calls a "symphony for a capella choir," entitled "Know Yourself," plus a sacred cantata and a requiem.

When he was asked to write a clarinet concerto for Alan Kay to perform at the New Paths in Music festival in June, Shchetynsky said, "I have thought about a clarinet concerto for many years, so this is an exceedingly exciting opportunity for me."

Polina Medyulyanova, born in Tashkent , Uzbekistan on April 4, 1974, comes from a long line of musicians. She is the grand-daughter of Boris Giyenko, a composer, and the pianist Tatyana Gienko, and the daughter of the conductor Viktor Medyulyanova. Her music lessons started with her grandfather when she was 4, and she wrote her first composition at 8. Later she studied with the composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky, and graduated from the Mukhtar Ashrafi Conservatory of Music in Tashkent in 1997. She completed her composition studies with Felix Yanov-Yanovsky, Dmitri's father, at the State Conservatory in Tashkent in 1999.

Medyulyanova taught composition for several years in Tashkent, and moved on to Amsterdam to study composition with Wim Hendricks and Fabio Nieder. She has also been active as a performer, playing piano, organ and chang, a Uzbek stringed instrument. As a pianist she formed two duos in Amsterdam, one with the German singer Antje Siefert and another with the Greek violinist Tania Sikelianou. Currently Medyulyanova lives in Bonn, Germany, and works primarily as a composer.

She has written extensively for a wide variety of ensembles, piano, organ and voice and chorus. There have been performances in festivals throughout Europe. Among her honors are an honorable mention in the Gaudeamus competition in the Netherlands in 2003 for "Ave Maris Stella," honorable mention in the Golden Hanukiya competition in Russia in 2005 for "Hitgalut/Revelation," and second prize in the Fanny Mendelssohn competition in Germany in 2006 for "Refractions."

Kassacia (exercises for orchestra), written for the New Paths in Music festival, has five short movements that are intended to describe different moods -- Wrath, Constructive Spite, Reveries, Expectancies and, finally, Joy.

Flute: Valerie Coleman
Flute: Svjetlana Kabalin
Oboe: Robert Ingliss
Clarinet: Alan Kay
Violin: Sunghae Anna Lim, concertmaster
Violin: Yonah Zur
Viola: Liuh-Wen Ting
Cello: Julia Lichten
Double bass: Gregg E. August
Bass clarinet: Virgil Blackwell
Bassoon: Thomas Sefcovic
French horn: Daniel Grabois
Trumpet: Thomas Hoyt
Trombone: Tim Albright
Percussion: John Ferrari
Percussion: Stephen Paysen
Piano: Geoffrey Burleson
Harp: Stacey Shames