Pyotr Meshchaninov

Pyotr Meshchaninov (1944 – 2006) was a Russian pianist and conductor specialized in Russian contemporary music.

In 1968 he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, where he studied piano class under D. D. Blagoy. Between 1968-91 he was a pianist with the USSR State Symphony Orchestra. He often performed with orchestras under the direction of G. N. Rozhdestvensky. He was one of the founders of the Moscow Experimental Electronic Music Studio (1967 - late 1970s), where he was an active participant and experimented with the ANS synthesizer. He premiered Sofia Gubaidulina's "Concerto for bassoon and low strings" in 1976, and later her compositions "Concordanza", "Quatro", and others. They would later marry, in 1991.^[1] That same year he moved to Germany, retaining Russian citizenship.

In the late 1960s, he developed an original concept for the development of pitch systems, which he called the "evolutionary elementary theory of music." He projected some properties of numbers (the so-called growth of number fields) onto the evolution of harmony in European music from antiquity to the 20th century. In connection with the study of Fibonacci numbers in the 1990s, he modified his theory to include an interpretation of the historical development of musical form and rhythm. The provisions of Meshchaninov's musical-mathematical theory were reflected in the lectures he gave in Moscow (for the first time in 1969) and in a number of German cities (in the 1990s), and in the articles and monographs of Yu.N. Kholopov and his students. His ideas had a significant impact on the Gubaidulina's compositional technique and aesthetics ^[2][3].

His recorded works include "Prometheus" by A. N. Scriabin and "Concerto grosso" by A. Ya. Eshpay (with the State Orchestra under the direction of E. F. Svetlanov, recorded in 1978 and 1979), "Exotic Birds" by O. Messiaen and "Wedding Cake" C. Saint-Saens (with GN Rozhdestvensky's orchestra, approx. 1979), "Stream" by AG Schnittke (implementation on the ANS synthesizer, 1969), "Quartet at the End of Time" by Messiaen (in an ensemble with I. Monighetti, L. Mikhailov and L. Isakadze, 1986). Meshchaninov's unpublished scientific works are kept in the archives of the Moscow Conservatory.

References

1. Biography of Gubaidulina Archived copy of August 5, 2018 at the Wayback Machine (in German).
2. Kurtz M. Sofia Gubaidulina. A biography. Stuttgart: Urachhaus, 2001, p. 244.
3. Hötzenecker K. The semantic composition concept Gubaidulina's Sonata "Rejoice!" with special consideration of the sketches and the published first version. Thesis. University of Vienna, 2010, pp. 21-22.
4. Brahms.Ircam.fr
5. Schimer.com

Text adapted from the Russian Wikipedia