The work of the composer Andrei Tikhomirov is not innovative in its essence - on the contrary, his music caresses the ear with pleasant melodies and clear classical forms. The composer has 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 of St. Petersburg, he was born on February 10, 1958 in a city on the Neva in a family far from musical art. The father of the Tikhomirov family, Genrikh Panteleimonovich, came to Leningrad from the Vologda region, received a higher technical education and worked at a defense enterprise; the mother was also an engineer. Nevertheless, music was always present in the Tikhomirov family: parents and grandparents loved to sing, there was a turntable and gramophone records with recordings of military marches, Soviet songs and classical works in the house, and a radio was always turned on in the kitchen, on which songs of the national stage were played. Two-year-old Andryusha could sit for hours in front of the turntable and listen to "On the Hills of Manchuria", "School Waltz", "First of all, planes!" - all this was the musical background of his childhood and adolescence.
Noticing the child's interest in music, the parents first gave Andrei a children's toy grand piano, and soon bought a real instrument - a black piano "Red October". Andrei enthusiastically “played music” on his own, but he reacted coolly to classes with a teacher - a student of the conservatory: the children's plays and exercises seemed very boring to him. Classes were discontinued, and until the 4th grade, the boy was an ordinary Soviet schoolboy on Vasilievsky Island in Leningrad.
A milestone event in the biography of Andrei Tikhomirov 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 endlessly listened to a disc with her recording, found in his home collection, and then through his mother's I got hold of some acquaintances and began to learn the piece on my own. He had a poor command of musical notation, could hardly read the notes in the bass clef, but the desire to play the "Moonlight Sonata" was so great that the boy comprehended the theory and practice of musical art with tremendous persistence. Having learned Lunar, Andrei switched to Pathetique, Apassionata and other works by Beethoven - 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 the music of other composers - Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Grieg. Mom took her son to the Kirov (Mariinsky) Theater to see the operas "Eugene Onegin" by Tchaikovsky and "Aida" by Verdi. The guy didn't really like the performances, but he undertook to compose his own opera "About Hares", which he tried to stage at home with his younger brother Alexei. Then Andrei began listening to operas on records, saving up money that his parents gave for breakfast at school, and buying sheet music with them.
Now the 11-year-old boy had a straight road to study music, and on the advice of a school singing teacher, Andrei Tikhomirov came to enter the Vasileostrovsk music school. Having played a 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 to Zhanna Lazarevna Metallidi. Tikhomirov is immensely grateful to these teachers for the knowledge and skills that they gave to the beginning musician.
Professional education
During the years of his school music education, Andrei Tikhomirov literally absorbed the work of foreign, Russian and Soviet composers: whenever possible he bought sheet music and books, played all the pieces at home on the piano, read a lot. After graduating from school in 1974, he entered the Leningrad Music College named after N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov, and after a month of study was transferred to the second year. The talented young man studied at once in two departments: the piano department of A. M. Serdyuk and composer by G. I. Ustvolskaya, and also studied vocals as an option.
Tikhomirov developed an interesting and unusual relationship with his teacher of composition, Galina Ivanovna Ustvolskaya. She was already a rather famous avant-garde composer, an extraordinary and even authoritarian personality. Andrei soon entered her inner circle, despite the 40-year age difference, he called Galya and “you” at her request, often visited Ustvolskaya as a guest - he had long and, according to him, strange conversations.
After graduating from college with honors in 1978, Andrei Tikhomirov entered, and in 1983 graduated from the Leningrad State Conservatory named after N. A. Rimsky-Korsakov. Tikhomirov's composition class was taught by the famous Soviet composer Sergei Mikhailovich Slonimsky.
Creativity and career
After completing his higher education, Andrei Genrikhovich Tikhomirov devoted himself to composing. His musical language went through a difficult path of formation: in his student years, he was fond of all sorts of avant-garde and modernist styles and trends, but he felt the alienness of newfangled trends. At some point, his love for classical music and childhood attachment to Soviet pop songs united, and pure, light and melodic music flowed from Tikhomirov's pen. The composer often hears reproaches for 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, Andrei Tikhomirov wrote such works as the operas "Dracula", "Fun of the Maidens", the chamber opera "The Last Days" based on the work of Mikhail Bulgakov, the children's opera "Fiction". For the symphony orchestra, the composer created three symphonies, a number of instrumental concerts (the most interesting is Fantasy-concerto - the Second Concerto for Piano and Orchestra). He is also the author of piano and instrumental works (for example, the Zum Abschied trio, dedicated to friends who left their homeland), chamber-vocal compositions (cycles on poems by Tolstoy, Jimenez, Agnivtsev and many others). Tikhomirov is a member of the Russian Union of Composers.
Andrey Tikhomirov's works are performed by many St. Petersburg, Moscow and other orchestras, they sound in concert halls and philharmonic societies throughout our country. The opera "The Last Days" was staged at the Great Hall of the St. Petersburg Philharmonic (in a concert version), and fragments of the opera "Dracula" were performed at the Novaya Opera in Moscow, in the Sirius Concert Hall in Sochi, etc.
Andrei Tikhomirov expounds his views on the problems of contemporary musical art in articles, essays, and shares his opinion in interviews. 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.
Personal life
Andrei Genrikhovich is married, his wife's name is Olga Fainitskaya, she is also a graduate of the Leningrad Conservatory. Olga and Andrey got married in 1980.
The husband and wife work together on the works of Tikhomirov: for example, Olga was directly involved in writing the libretto for the opera Dracula, and she did it, according to her husband, very professionally, with an understanding of the specifics of the opera genre. Currently, the couple live in Bulgaria, in the city of Sofia.
The couple have a son, Arkady Tikhomirov, who, like his parents, is a musician (singer, performer, composer). Arkady is married to Anna Pekarskaya.
