This April in Moscow the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall is hosting the world premiere of ‘The Rest Is Silence’, an innovative orchestral work by Russian composer Vladimir Rannev which will be performed by the Russian National Youth Orchestra and conducted Philip Chizhevsky.

Composer and musicologist Vladimir Rannev (b.1970) who also directs his own operas is today known not only within his native Russia but also throughout Europe. Born and raised in Moscow, he moved to St Petersburg to study composition with Boris Tishchenko (1939–2010) who had been a pupil of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975). After graduating from the St Petersburg Conservatory he left Russia to settle for some years in Cologne as a student at the Cologne Higher School of Music under Hans Ulrich Humpert (1940–2010), a leading specialist in electronic music.

Together with fellow composers Dmitry Kurlyandsky (b. 1968), Sergej Newski (b. 1972), Boris Filanovsky (b. 1968), Alexei Syumak (b. 1976) and Valery Voronov (b. 1970), he was a member of the group SoMa – Material Resistance – a musical association that attempted to redefine the cultural field during the mid-2000s.

Today Vladimir Rannev works across a wide variety of genres, with cultural institutions both in Russia and Europe including musical theatre and the performing arts – drama, opera and ballet. He has written music for three recent productions by leading playwright Marina Davidova in Berlin and Vienna. Some years ago, he wrote ‘20 Variations’, symphonic music for ‘Ultima Thule’, a ballet at the Perm Opera Theatre in Russia, choreographed by Vyacheslav Samodurov (b. 1974) and a second commission is due to premiere in Perm in 2027.

Aside from music for the stage, Rannev also works with contemporary art spaces, such as the Ground Solyanka Gallery Katya Bochavar creating sound installations. These unconventional breakthroughs beyond ‘academic music’ pushes the genre boundaries, changing our ideas of what opera can be. All of these experiments ‘at the borders’, at the crossroads of genres, traditions and arts, add up to an important metatext of the era: gesamtkunstwerk in its current form.

When he started out, it was not classical music but rock that interested him, dedicating seven years of his life to this genre, a passion sparked off almost by chance, he says, “Two episodes in my life turned out to be pivotal for me. The first when I accidentally found myself at a semi-underground rock concert, in 1986. And the second when I went to the St Petersburg Conservatory.” The rock concert pulled the rug from under 16-year-old Rannev: “At that rock concert I suddenly realised that what I was doing at music school like Czerny’s Etudes and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier was disconnected from reality. Suddenly I realised that I was living in some kind of closed, refined world, disconnected from actual musical life; it was as if I was left behind in an old music box”. Looking back to his formative years, he feels blessed: “My generation was lucky: at a young age, when everyone wants some kind of openness, freedom, throwing stones, the world responded to my desire, harmonised with it. Unlike my parents’ generation, for whom at the very same time, on the contrary, everything was collapsing; they lived in a sense of impending catastrophe.”

Later on, he became aware of the limitations of the rock scene. “I remember clearly the day when the frontman of our band and I went to Gnesinka [Ed. – Russian Academy of Music named after Gnesins] to look for a new drummer. From behind a wall, I could hear someone playing a complex piece of music on a vibraphone. I was deeply struck by the rhythmic richness, complexity, brightness”. A year later Rannev entered the Merzlyakov School at the Moscow Conservatory to get a serious education, finding his initial steps under Konstantin Batashov, who he found too authoritarian so he started looking elsewhere: “I was looking for an alternative. And besides, all these years I regularly went to St Peterburg, it was the Mecca of Russian rock at that time. There was a famous rock club there called ‘Tam-tam’, we played there. So, I thought, ‘St. Pete is what I want’”. So, at 28 he passed the entrance exams for the St Petersburg Conservatory with flying colours having already written his first composition.

Rannev has of today written a total of six operas. ‘Bluebeard. Materials of the Case’ was staged at the St Petersburg Planetarium, and the opera ‘Two Acts’ to a libretto by Russian poet and Conceptual artist Dmitry Prigov was staged in the atrium of the Hermitage. He participated in a mega-project by Moscow theatre director Boris Yukhananov (b. 1957), writing the fifth and final part of ‘an opera series in five evenings and six composers’, ‘The Sverlians’, produced at the Electrotheatre in Moscow in 2015. This was followed by ‘Prose’ in 2017 in the same theatre, directed by Rannev himself, and based on texts by Yuri Mamleev and Anton Chekhov, which won a flurry of awards. In Dresden, on the anniversary of the tragic bombing of the city at the end of World War II, he received a commission to create an opera based on Kurt Vonnegut's novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ which premiered in 2020. The stuff of raw emotions, Vonnegut had written his most famous novel based on his own personal experiences of being in Dresden during the 1945 air raid, as prisoner of war, who had just managed to escape.

Rannev's latest opera work created in 2024 called ‘Seryozha Is Very Dumb’, has proved popular at Perm’s Theatre-Theatre since it premiered last year. “Like ‘Prose’ I invented this opera from scratch. It is rather unconventional because I made the orchestra from 75 household appliances!.”

His interests today are not just limited to the stage, one tangential body of his work is focussed on musical installations. In the sound installation ‘Tuning’, commissioned by GES-2 in Moscow, he pioneered a constructive principle which later formed the basis for the forthcoming premiere at the Moscow Philharmonic. The work is made of 115 final chords (or unisons) from works by various composers from the classical-romantic era, in Rannev's opus in the same chordal arrangement and timbre as in the original. This intriguing sound installation, created and recorded specially for the project ‘Tuning-2’, seemed to permeate the exhibition spaces, becoming a sound architecture, building complex connections between the auditory and visual.

‘Tuning’ links with his new composition, ‘The Rest Is Silence’ created for the Moscow Philharmonic using a similar method, its title loaded with cultural connotations. This time Rannev used the final chords of some four hundred works, including symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler and Bruckner, and virtually all Russian composers, from Tchaikovsky and Scriabin to the Mighty Handful. “A few years ago Dmitry Renansky, curator of musical programmes at GES-2, suggested that I make a sound installation. That is when I came up with the idea of using final notes. There are some things that are so self-evident that we do not normally reflect on them. For example, we never question why a symphony always ends on the tonic [Ed. In music theory the tonic is the first note of a scale and the tonal centre of a piece]. Even in Romanticism, where the uniqueness of the composer's creation as the handwriting of a genius was put on a pedestal, there was a strict observation of certain musical conventions, and the signal for the end of this music is the tonic triad or unison on a tonic sound.”. Only the rarest exceptions confirm the rule, it is an undisputed standard.

“Even in musical opuses which are instrumentally very sophisticated, full of compositional breakthroughs and discoveries, the heart and ear rest on the tonic. Even in Scriabin's ‘Prometheus’, with its hegemony of the Promethean chord, we still hear the F-sharp major triad in the finale. In this case it was important to me that the title of the piece reflected the constructive principle, so the meaning of the title lies in the fact that after the last note there is silence.”