The work of the composer Andrei Tikhomirov is not innovative in nature - on the contrary, his music caresses the ear with pleasant melodies and clear classical forms. The composer developed his own musical style, which he adheres to in his works throughout his professional career.
Childhood and youth
Andrei Genrikhovich Tikhomirov is a native Petersburger, he was born on February 10, 1958 in a city on the Neva in a family far from musical art. Genrikh Panteleimonovich Tikhomirov, the father of the family, arrived in Leningrad from the Vologda Oblast, received a higher technical education and worked at a defense enterprise; mother was also an engineer. Nevertheless, music was constantly present in the Tikhomirov family: parents and grandparents loved to sing, in the house there was a player and records with recordings of military marches, Soviet songs and classical works, and in the kitchen there was always a radio on which domestic pop songs sounded. Two-year-old Andryusha could sit for hours in front of the player and listen to "On the hills of Manchuria", "School Waltz", "The first thing is airplanes!" - all this was the musical background of his childhood and youth.
Noticing the child’s interest in music, parents gave Andrei first a children's toy piano, and soon bought a real instrument - the black piano “Red October”. Andrei enthusiastically “played music” on his own, but he reacted coolly to classes with a teacher - student of the conservatory: children's plays and exercises seemed very boring to him. Classes were discontinued, and until the 4th grade the boy was an ordinary Soviet schoolchild on Vasilievsky Island in Leningrad.
A significant event in Andrei Tikhomirov’s biography happened when he was 10 years old: the boy heard Ludwig van Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata No. 14 on the radio and “fell ill” with this music: he listened endlessly to the record with her recording, found in his home collection, and then through his mother’s acquaintances got notes and began to independently learn the work. He was poorly versed in musical notation, barely read notes in a bass way, but the desire to play "Moonlight Sonata" was so great that the boy with tremendous tenacity comprehended the theory and practice of musical art. Having learned “Moonlight”, Andrei switched to “Pathetic”, “Apassionata” and other Beethoven compositions - this composer became a “god” for the boy. Obeying a creative impulse, Tikhomirov even made an attempt to compose his sonata "a la Beethoven".
Soon, Andrei became interested in music and other composers - Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Grieg. Mom took her son to the Kirovsky (Mariinsky) Theater to the operas "Eugene Onegin" by Tchaikovsky and "Aida" Verdi. The guy didn’t really like the performances, but he undertook to compose his own opera “About the Hares, ” which he tried to stage at home with his younger brother Alexei. Then Andrei began to listen to operas on records, to save money that parents gave for breakfast at school, and to buy notes on them.
Now the 11-year-old boy had a direct way to study music, and on the advice of a school teacher of singing, Andrei Tikhomirov came to enter the Vasileostrovsky music school. Having played part of the independently learned "Pathetic" sonata, as well as one of his own compositions, the boy was immediately enrolled in the fourth grade of the piano department to Konstantin Konstantinovich Roginsky and in parallel to the composition class for Zhanna Lazarevna Metallidi. Tikhomirov is immensely grateful to these teachers for the knowledge and skills that they gave to the novice musician.
Professional education
During the years of school musical education, Andrei Tikhomirov literally absorbed the works of foreign, Russian and Soviet composers: if possible, he bought notes and books, lost all the works of the house on the piano, and read a lot. Upon graduation in 1974, he entered the Leningrad College of Music named after N.A. Rimsky-Korsakov, and after a month of study was transferred to the second year. A talented young man studied at once in two departments: the piano under A.M. Serdyuk and composer at G.I. Ustvolskaya, as well as optionally engaged in vocals.
Interesting and unusual relations developed between Tikhomirov and his composition teacher Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya. She was already a rather famous avant-garde composer, an extraordinary and even authoritarian personality. Andrei soon entered her inner circle, in spite of the 40-year age difference, he called Galey and “you” at her request, often visited Ustvolskaya — he had long and, according to him, strange conversations.
After graduating from college with honors in 1978, Andrei Tikhomirov entered, and in 1983 he graduated from the N.A. Leningrad State Conservatory Rimsky-Korsakov. The composition class at Tikhomirov was conducted by the famous Soviet composer Sergei Mikhailovich Slonimsky.
Creativity and career
After completing higher education, Andrei Genrikhovich Tikhomirov devoted himself to composing. His musical language went a difficult way of formation: in his student years, he was fond of all kinds of avant-garde and modernist styles and trends, but he felt the alienness of new-fangled trends. At one point, his love of classical music and his childhood attachment to Soviet pop songs came together, and pure, bright and melodic music flowed from under Tikhomirov’s pen. The composer often hears reproaches in the simplicity and primitiveness of his compositions, but he is not going to change his views on musical art and its role in people's lives.
Over the years of his work, Andrei Tikhomirov has written such works as the operas Dracula, Fun of the Maidens, the chamber opera The Last Days based on the work of Mikhail Bulgakov, and the children's opera Nebylitsa. For the symphony orchestra, the composer created three symphonies, a series of instrumental concerts (the most interesting is Fantasy-concerto - Second Concert for Piano and Orchestra). He is also the author of piano and instrumental works (for example, the trio Zum Abschied, dedicated to friends who left their homeland), chamber-vocal compositions (cycles to poems by Tolstoy, Jimenez, Agnivtsev and many others). Tikhomirov is a member of the Russian Union of Composers.
The works of Andrei Tikhomirov are performed by many St. Petersburg, Moscow and other orchestras, sound in concert halls and philharmonic societies throughout our country. The Last Days opera was staged on the stage of the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (in concert), and fragments of the opera Dracula were performed at the New Opera in Moscow, at the Sirius concert hall in Sochi, etc.
Andrei Tikhomirov sets out his views on the problems of contemporary musical art in articles, essays, and shares his opinion in an interview. In addition, the composer maintains his own website, where you can read about music and musicians, listen to works of authorship and download sheet music.
