Syarhey Pyatrovich Bel'styukow

Syarhey Pyatrovich Bel'styukow (Bolbasovo, Vitebsk Region, 1956) is a Belarusian composer who trained at the Minsk Conservatoire, graduating in 1980 after studying piano with G. I. Shershevsky. Between 1982 and 1987 he studied composition, then worked as an assistant lecturer and undertook postgraduate studies with Hlebaw. His professional career also extends to radio and theatre: in 1992 he was appointed head of the music section and director of the Teatr yunogo zritelya («Theatre of the Young Spectator»), and in 1994 he became deputy director of music and entertainment programmes at Belarusian Radio.

His music seeks a strong emotional charge, values the symbolic ambiguity of artistic images and the theatrical expressiveness of form. He has collaborated with theatre and film producers, and is drawn to the traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as in his two piano toccatas or in Pechal'noye prinosheniye Motsartu («A Sad Offering to Mozart»). He has a romantic inclination to give instrumental form to ethical and philosophical problems, and his affinity with the Russian school appears in the Symphony Gravyurï («Engravings», 1990) and in his Second Symphony with bells (1993). Old Church Slavonic and the figure of the Belarusian master Skorina shape the choral work Tvar Skarïnï («The Face of Skorina»).

In the field of electroacoustic music, Bel'styukow is interested in the acoustic metamorphosis of sound across time and space, and advocates a synthesis between electronic music and acoustic instruments, as seen in Muzïka dlya goboya i magnitnoy lentï («Music for Oboe and Magnetic Tape», 1989), Strontsiy-90 (1990) and Muzïka morya («Sea Music», 1993). His stylistic mobility reflects the intense creative activity of late twentieth-century Belarus, and he is a composer whose output illustrates well that period of transition.