Music From Other Minds

Program 581: Giya Kancheli

KALW Broadcast Date: November 8, 2019 | Host: Randall Wong

This evening we listened to two works by the Georgian composer, Giya Kancheli, who died this past month on October 2, 2019. Kancheli was the most prominent Georgian composer of his generation. His fellow Soviet colleague Rodion Shchedrin assessed him as “an ascetic with the temperament of a maximalist – a restrained Vesuvius.” Much of Kancheli’s music combines stillness and beauty with latent violence that occasionally erupts to devastating expressive effect, sometimes described as dolorous yet spiritually radiant. In the composer’s words, “’When a person goes into a church, synagogue or mosque where there’s not service going on, there’s a special kind of silence. I want to turn that silence into music.”

Program Audio

30-Second Spot