Aleksandr Rabinovich

Aleksandr Rabinovich was born in Baku on 30 March 1945 and trained at the Moscow Conservatory between 1963 and 1967, where he studied composition with Kabalevsky and Aleksandr Pirumov, and piano with N. Fischman. He belongs to a generation of Soviet musicians whose proposals remained on the margins of public life: in Russia he introduced works by Messiaen, Stockhausen and Ives, while his own unconventional music was never performed or published.

In 1974 he emigrated to France and, from 1980, lived in Geneva and Brussels. He is also a notable pianist and frequently performs in duo with Martha Argerich, although his work as a composer is the one that holds pride of place in his career. His style began under the influence of Shostakovich and later drew closer to Western avant-garde, until he arrived at a highly personal language that rejects the idea of a linear historical progression. He conceives of time as non-linear and cyclical, which accounts for an unconventional formal logic, with frequent pauses in the internal flow of time that focus attention on a repeated pattern.

His music combines minimalist-style repetition with quotations from the Romantic vocabulary, ranging from Schubert to popular music, and with an organisation based on symbolic numerical proportions derived from Kabbalistic and Gnostic traditions. The result is a mosaic of incantatory formulas rooted in late Romanticism, which the listener perceives almost as ritual. His legacy lies in the territory of postmodern stylistic tolerance: the deliberate use of the Romantic cliché and the pursuit of a harmony of the world, despite the essential imperfection of its material, set him apart in the music of the late twentieth century.