Yury Shaheni Ghazarian

Yuri Shaheni Ghazarian (born Tiflis, 4 December 1933) is an Armenian composer whose career combines training in Yerevan with a marked attraction to Russian and American music. Born in Tiflis, he studied at the Yerevan Conservatory with Yeghiazarian between 1959 and 1964, and afterwards joined the Union of Composers of Armenia, of which he went on to serve as secretary from 1971 to 1974.

Alongside his work for the Union, he belonged to several artistic organisations and came to lead some of them. In 1993 UNESCO awarded him an honorary doctorate in the arts, the same year he temporarily settled in California. His language drew on the Russian tradition, above all Shostakovich and Prokofiev; from the latter he took a taste for a grotesque, almost poster-like characterisation, which he turned into a kind of montage technique, as heard in the ballet Adam i Eva and the symphonic poem Vstrechi.

His chamber music shows a preference for classical forms, a clear harmonic logic and functional instrumentation. American jazz, particularly sung blues and the rhythmic structures of compound chords, appears in the ballets Rozovïy gorod and Mir Pikasso. The opera Ėrnest Kheminguėy, based on the writer's Cuban period, fuses drama, cinematography, cantilena and declamation, and culminates in the choreographic scene Starik i more, inspired by Afro-Cuban folk music.

Ghazarian is known above all for the synthesis of traditions that his catalogue displays, ranging from ballet to symphonic and vocal music. His work is performed less outside Armenia than its reach would merit, but it remains a reference for understanding the Armenian Soviet generation of the late twentieth century.