Death of composer Edouard Artemiev, master of electronics

The musician had notably signed the soundtracks of three films by Andreï Tarkovski, “Solaris”, “Le Miroir” and “Stalker”.

by Bruno Lesprit

His death on December 29 in Moscow, the same day as the King of Football Pelé and the Empress of Punk Vivienne Westwood, went unnoticed, an eclipse that will recall the previous one of another Russian composer, Serge Prokofiev, whose The disappearance on March 5, 1953 was buried by tributes to Joseph Staline. The name of Edouard Artemiev, who was 85 years old, is nevertheless familiar with lovers of Soviet cinema. Like those who attended the Cosmos in Paris (today the Arlequin), an establishment dedicated in the 1980s to the programming of films labeled by the state organization Sovexportfilm. They see his name in the credits of the works of the most inventive and influential by the Soviet filmmaker of the post-war period, Andreï Tarkovski, including Artemiev signs the soundtracks of Solaris (1972), Le Miroir (1975) and Stalker (1979). And foreshadowed to hear that, behind the iron curtain, there was a cousin of Vangelis and the German group Tangerine Dream. A master of synthesizers and ambient electronic music.

From the 1970s, Artemiev became the Soviet reference for film music, an exercise in which Prokofiev had shone with Eisenstein with the partitions of Alexandre Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible. The cosmic beauty of his music for Tarkovski led him to work with Nikita Mikhalkov, at the time when he adapted Tchekhov (unfinished partition for Mechanical Piano, 1977) and Gontcharov (a few days in Oblomov’s life, 1980) and N ‘was not yet an ultra -nationalist propagandist. And also with Mikhalkov’s brother Andreï Kontchalovski, for the historic fresco of Siberiades, Grand Prix du Jury in 1979 at the Cannes Film Festival.

This contains the most famous theme of Artemiev, the death of a hero, used for the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympic Games in 2014, as was an extract from ours for the fence The others, Western Spaghetti with Chekists directed by Mikhalkov in 1974. The filmmaker took model on Sergio Leone and Artiev, logically, on Ennio Morricone by summoning a trumpet of death Mariachie. Forty years later, his music was honored in the same way as that of Tchaikovski, Moussorgski or Stravinsky, which gives an idea of ​​the status he had acquired in his country. For a long time already since Artemiev had composed the ritual cantata, from the writings of Pierre de Coubertin, for the Moscow Olympic Games in 1980. A “symbiosis of all the means of expression at my disposal (…) with the electronics as pivot, “he explained. The work indeed used the great means, by associating a symphonic orchestra and a group of rock, solo voices and a choir by force synthesizers.

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/Media reports cited above.