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Giya Kancheli, born 10 August 1935, in Tbilisi, is a Georgian composer resident in Belgium.
Since 1991, Kancheli has lived in Western Europe: first in Berlin, and since 1995 in Antwerp, where he is composer-in-residence for the Royal Flemish Philharmonic.
Kancheli has written seven symphonies, and what he terms a liturgy for viola and orchestra, called Mourned by the Wind. His Fourth Symphony received its American premiere, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Yuri Temirkanov, in January 1978, not long before the cultural freeze in the United States against Soviet culture. Glasnost allowed Kancheli to regain exposure, and he began to receive frequent commissions, as well as performances within Europe and America.
Championed internationally by the likes of Dennis Russell Davies, Jansug Kakhidze, Gidon Kremer, Yuri Bashmet, Kim Kashkashian, Mstislav Rostropovich, and the Kronos Quartet, Kancheli has seen world premieres of his works in Seattle, as well as with the New York Philharmonic under Kurt Masur. He continues to receive regular commissions. New CDs of his recent works are regularly released, notably on the ECM label.
In Georgia, Kancheli's work is well-known in the theatre, from which he draws much of his musical composition. For two decades, he served as the music director of the Rustaveli Theatre in Tbilisi. He composed an opera Music for the Living. He has written music for dozens of films, many of them well-known in the Russian-speaking world but virtually unknown outside it, such as Georgi Daneliya's sci-fi cult hit Kin-dza-dza!.
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