Evgeni Irshai

Biography

The first music teacher in the house was, in effect, the whole family routine: his father, Mark Aleksandrovich Irshai (1921–2015), played violin in the orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre, and his mother, Valentina Yakovlevna Kunde (1922–1990), headed the piano department of the specialised secondary music school attached to the Leningrad Conservatory.

Evgeni Irshai was born on 15 January 1951 in Leningrad. He finished the school at the conservatory in 1969 and went on to study at the conservatory itself. He studied composition with Vladimir Uspensky and graduated from that class in 1975; according to other accounts, he also studied composition with a teacher named Chernov. At the same time he studied piano with Pavel Serebryakov and completed that course in 1978. For a time he taught at the school attached to the conservatory, and in 1979 he was admitted to the Union of Composers of the USSR, the official professional body of Soviet composers. In the Soviet years he wrote mostly for chamber ensembles. From this period come the Piano Sonata “Seven Reflections in C” (1983), “Kandinsky’s Improvisations” for double bass and bassoon, a Sonata for cello and percussion, and a Farewell Sonata for cello and piano, dedicated to the memory of musicians killed in the war. He wrote a great deal for voice; among the vocal works the cycle “Epigraphs”, to poems by Arseny Tarkovsky, stands out. In 1982 he wrote the music for the television film “A Simultaneous Chess Exhibition”, made by a director named Lebedev.

In 1991 Irshai moved to Slovakia. At first he worked as a repetiteur at the opera theatre in Banská Bystrica; in 1992–1996 he taught at the city conservatory, and from 1996 to 2008 in the department of music and aesthetic education at Matej Bel University. Since 2001 he has taught at the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where he became a professor in 2010 and later headed the department of composition and conducting. In 2006 his monograph “On Some Problems of Compositional Technique” appeared, and in 2011 a collection of essays, “Waiting for Bach” (in Slovak, “Čakanie na Bacha”).

In his later work, pieces for soloist and orchestra occupy a prominent place. Among them is “Ma’ariv” for cello and string orchestra (2013), a meditation on a Jewish prayer. Irshai’s works have been performed on commission by the cellists Sergei Roldugin, Jozef Lupták and Ján Kalinowski, the double bassist Aleksander Gabryš, the violinist Milan Paľa, the tenor Pavol Brešlik and the pianist Marek Szlezer.

In 2018 he completed the “Requiem for the Poet”, to a Latin text and poems by Alexander Pushkin, Angelus Silesius, William Shakespeare, Czesław Miłosz, Boris Khersonsky and Ivan Krasko. To my mind the choice of authors is revealing in itself: from Silesius, who lived in the seventeenth century, to Khersonsky, born in 1950.

Irshai has received the Slovak Ján Levoslav Bella Prize, which he won in 2000 for the trio “Hard-Shabes”, and the Ukrainian Desider Zador Prize, awarded in 2008 for the composition “Sonata del grato”.