St. Petersburg resident Igor Vdovin is a very versatile composer who writes music both for the modular synthesisers and for the symphonic orchestras. He is known and loved both for his slick electronic pieces from the Gamma album that was released in the early 2000s, and for the skilful soundtracks to the best examples of contemporary Russian art house movies, such as Renata Litvinova’s The Goddess, Alexei German’s Garpastum, Anna Melikian’s Mermaid, and Nikolai Khomeriki’s TV show Dragon Syndrom. Vdovin’s name is most often seen on the posters of the Symphonic Kino orchestra project that’s touring Russia. For this project, the composer took the songs of the Russian rock star Viktor Tsoi (of the Kino band) and re-arranged them, using the musical vocabulary of Wagner and Brahms. Maneuvering between academic music and popular culture, Igor Vdovin is neither a part of the philharmonic world, nor a night club regular, and that’s just the way he likes it.

Vdovin’s latest album is called 24. 24 stands for the 24 piano preludes, so romantic they remind the listener of Chopin. The composer used 24 tonalities, writing a laconic piece in each of them. The formats are all different, there are plenty of melodic experiments, tributes to all of Vdovin’s music heroes — from Johann Sebastian Bach to Valentin Silvestrov and Salvatore Sciarrino — and even some musical jokes. Unlike the majority of contemporary acoustic music, which is written in a traditional manner and for traditional instruments, Igor Vdovin’s work extends beyond just one or two methods, is full of original ideas, but short on the runtime, making the pieces easily digestible to the contemporary audience. Each composition from the  artist’s “quiet statements” can be seen as a separate story with its own set of circumstances — the hero’s appearance, the evolvement of his personality, youthful whims, dreams, and delusions, conflicts with superior adversaries, and final battles. But everything ends well. “In the end, all of these pieces are about love, and how good trumps evil, and enlightenment trumps ignorance and vulgarity,” sums up the composer.

Moscow premiere of 24 will be a part of the SOUND UP festival. The collection of grand piano pieces will be performed by the winner of numerous international competitions Peter Aidu.