Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kobekin

Vladimir Aleksandrovich Kobekin was born in Beryozniki, in Perm Oblast, on 22 July 1947. He is a Russian composer whose work is concentrated above all in musical theatre, the field in which he has developed his most innovative proposals. He trained at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he attended the class of Sergei Slonimsky, and graduated in 1971.

On completing his studies he began teaching composition at the Urals Conservatory, from 1971 to 1980. He later chaired the Urals branch of the Union of Composers of Russia, from 1992 to 1995, and since 1995 he has held a full professorship in the composition department of that same conservatory. In 1987 he was awarded the title of Honoured Art Worker and, in the same year, was named a laureate of the USSR State Prize.

His catalogue spans numerous genres, but it is on the stage that his main interest is displayed. His operas differ from one another in content, genre and dramatic procedures, and in two of them he also took charge of the staging, seeking to push the idea of total theatre to its limits. The triptych Prorok (The Prophet, 1983) brings together materials from two works by Pushkin and from an oratorio of his own, combining Gregorian chant, with echoes of the Dies irae, with folk elements and music for Spanish guitar. Kobekin seeks to draw the audience into participation through allusion, both philosophical and magical, and makes use of the scenic metaphor, masked characters and the confrontation between tradition and radicalism. To organise the form of his works he has devised a technique he calls melopoeia or melodic epic, to which he links his theories of superpolyphony, and which he teaches at the Urals Conservatory.

He has collaborated with numerous theatres and leading figures of Russian opera, and has taken part in festivals in various parts of Russia and in competitions in Kassel, Loccum and Ludwigsberg. His legacy rests on an original body of stage works that combines ancient and modern traditions, as well as on his pedagogical and theoretical work in the Urals.