What takes away life, music restores

Beauty exists where the artist perceives connections between genres and different forms of art. Composer Teodor Doré speaks of a path where creativity becomes religion, and attention to detail the only means of creating something genuine.

When I was four years old, one morning on the edge of sleep and waking, I heard an orchestra. The music played so loudly that it filled the entire room, the house and the space around it. I thought a concert was on television and asked my father to turn the music down. To which my father replied with surprise that there was no concert, and he was actually watching a football match. And then I realised the music was sounding inside me, and that the room was in fact filled with entirely different sounds. That's how it began — a lifelong journey in search of the source of music and perpetual attempts to record without distortion what I hear in my head.

I was born into a creative family where art was the air we breathed. My mother was a pianist, my grandmother a choir conductor and music theorist who prepared many students for entry to the Moscow Conservatory. My very life was woven from art. From the age of four I would approach the instrument, press the keys, accompanied by my mother. I sang in my grandmother's vocal ensemble and travelled to festivals in Italy. My grandfather, Vitaly Zaikov, was a major Soviet sculptor. Together with Yevgeny Vuchetich he worked on The Motherland Calls in Volgograd, and in Chelyabinsk he created the monument Tale of the Urals, which today appears on the five-thousand-rouble banknote. My grandfather has more than forty-five monuments across post-Soviet territory. In childhood I spent much time in his studio — mixing clay, fetching tools, building scaffolding. He reinterpreted classical heritage and was deeply drawn to the Renaissance and Rome.

This atmosphere, where every day was saturated with creativity, shaped my view of the world. I wouldn't want people to visit museums to touch art — I'd want their entire lives to be art. And from early childhood I know what such a life feels like. There's no boundary between stage and daily life, between creativity and routine. Every event, meeting or conversation can become part of a larger canvas if you're open to it.

The path to music begins with teachers who know which door must be opened. Otherwise, the process drags on, and much is lost. My first composition teacher, Lyubov Taran, helped me shape my thoughts and taught me to notate the inner orchestra I heard in my head. This isn't simple for a young musician — understanding how to express what you hear in notes. Then came Nikolai Burtsev, now head of the piano department at the Guangzhou Conservatory in China. But particularly important to me was Igor Kotlyarevsky, professor at the Moscow Conservatory. His teacher, Sergei Dorensky, was a pupil of Grigory Ginzburg — thus a living chain of transmitted mastery is formed. Dorensky taught Lugansky and Matsuev. Professor Kotlyarevsky taught me to reflect, analyse the text, listen to different performers, seek my own path, give free rein to imagination. He used to say, “You could practise for one hour a day with maximum attention and, most importantly, with imagination. Or for twenty hours without it, and the result would be the same.”

In Barcelona, at the Liceu Conservatory, my professor was Benjamin Davies, a Briton from London. His father, Meredith Davies, was Benjamin Britten's favourite conductor, and together they presented the premiere of the War Requiem in Coventry. Benjamin gave me what I hadn't found in Moscow — freedom. He said: “Write what you want, but do it professionally.” In the Moscow compositional school everything came down to the avant-garde, to complete imitation of the teacher's language, to atonal music which after the Second World War flooded concert halls. This music is disharmonious, destructive, and usually an unprepared listener cannot understand what's happening on stage. It's absolutely opposite in essence to music such as that written by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Benjamin said: your harmonies are your palette, your colours, your own choice. Paint with any colours you like. If Moscow demanded monochrome, here I received permission for the full spectrum.

Benjamin said that what distinguishes a good composer from a bad one is attention to detail. When you're attentive to moods, to transitions, to the fullness of each phrase, you create something genuine. If not, nothing comes of it. Another phrase of his I'll never forget, “You can deliberately confuse the listener, lead them through a labyrinth of sounds, play chess with the audience, but you mustn't confuse yourself. Play, but don't lose. It's a fine line, easily crossed.”

At the conservatory we were taught to be universal composers — to try everything. Every day we had to submit at least two minutes of music, the so-called Hollywood standard. In the first months, this took sixteen hours, almost the whole day and part of the night. Then ten hours, then two, then one. Quality didn't suffer. You mobilise yourself, learn to fight a kind of narcotic dependence on inspiration. The muse visits those who labour. If you idle, she won't come to you. Hemingway said, “I'll walk into a tavern in Paris intending to drink a beer and write a story in fifteen minutes about that glass of beer. If I write it, I'm a good writer. If not, I should be thrown on the rubbish heap.” Márquez wrote two pages of text every day, crossed them out, and One Hundred Years of Solitude was born that way. Sometimes in a day only one good paragraph emerged. He'd be upset and smoke three packets of cigarettes. Persistence and the permanence of process were present in all the greats.

At Liceu we often wrote music as an entire course to the same short films — six people from different countries, but each made their own version. If someone did poorly, we'd tease them, but we always supported and helped with our advice and observations. It was a masculine affair, competition and learning at once. Everyone shared their experience. Barcelona is a difficult place to work, this city of perpetual celebration. But they placed us in a kind of monastic atmosphere, in a cell, and it produced remarkable results. I learnt Spanish in four months of intensive immersion — six hours at school and three hours of homework daily. My brain rewired itself. Now my Spanish is better than my English, though I struggled with English for years.

I define my style as a new wave of Renaissance in music — Renaissance-21. It's a rebirth, a return to harmony, to beauty, to classical tradition, whilst also permitting synthesis with electronics and national instruments from different countries. The beauty of music and its semantic content are paramount. Recently, particularly in London and New York, concept often takes first place — concept in which there's no substance. The orchestra spews factory noise, but it isn't music. Worse still is when the concept becomes the author's nationality, race, gender, and works are chosen not for artistic merit but for affiliation, for agenda. For Renaissance-21, timeless value matters, and everything else is secondary. Now this cultural movement is gaining strength and followers in London. With friends I've written a manifesto, and we're launching a series of events to give artists of the new age the opportunity to be heard. The first will take place in March at the National Liberal Club, a private British club, the favourite resting place of lords and Members of Parliament.

The sixth album, Portraits of Cities, became an example of uniting cultures. More than thirty musicians from different countries participated in its creation. The idea originated six years ago when I was travelling by train from St Petersburg after a concert at Erarta to a concert in Helsinki. The first composition created for this album is called 'Train to Helsinki'. Overall, in this album I thought about how to unite the piano with traditional instruments from many countries, whilst also making field recordings: the sounds of nighttime Mumbai, signals in the Barcelona metro, the chimes of clocks in Bangkok, and so forth. Essentially, this album comprises sonic postcards, portraits of cities I've visited during my tours. I studied Indian ragas, maqams, European folk modes deeply, searching for new colours, instruments, voices. Portraits became an album that crosses genres and continents.

Music usually comes in two ways. Sometimes I hear it fully formed, as if someone is whispering; you might be walking down the street and everything's already sounding in your head. A clear mind is needed to transmit this without distortion. The second way is improvisation at the instrument. Hands find passages, phrases are born. Herbie Hancock said: “When you've played through so much in life, your hands themselves lead you to new music, the unconscious discovers its voice.” The strongest themes can leave their colour, even taste and scent, for a long time. They lodge in the soul. There are sketches of compositions I wrote when I was eighteen or nineteen that are still waiting their hour. I'm not hurrying. Everything unworthy is forgotten, and that's normal, whilst what's worthy remains.

Tchaikovsky's First Concerto for me is spring, the melting of ice, the river breaking its banks. The majestic chords are an entrance into the world. This is power, light, such brilliant orange, then shades of green. The second movement is imbued with folk simplicity, nature, lyricism. The finale is a dance, celebration. This concerto is a revolution in the genre of the Romantic concerto, in many ways a harbinger of Rachmaninoff's Second Concerto.

Rachmaninoff is my favourite composer. With him I love every note. The Second and Third Concertos are the very quintessence of music from my point of view. No one has surpassed Rachmaninoff in the breadth of phrases, for this is the most difficult thing — to make transitions between themes natural. This is where a composer's mastery reveals itself. His music is as broad as a river whose banks can't be seen. I'd take the Second Concerto to a desert island, Earl Wild's recording with Jascha Horenstein.

Two years ago, I began work on the orchestration of Rachmaninoff's lost Suite in D minor. The composer wrote it in 1891, the very year Tchaikovsky was invited to the opening of Carnegie Hall. The Suite in D minor largely defined Rachmaninoff's style and influenced the Third Concerto.

It's 29 January 2025. New York is minus seventeen. Snow blankets Manhattan, and we're on stage in the legendary hall. We're presenting Rachmaninoff's lost suite in a transcription for a piano trio I've worked on for so long with the blessing of the composer's great-granddaughter. My New York creative family: Taisiia Losmakova, formerly first violin of the Belarusian National Orchestra; Sergei Antonov, cellist and winner of the Tchaikovsky Competition; soprano Anastasia Roitman, who's just returned from Copenhagen after triumph at the Danish Philharmonic. Before us, giants stood here. We continue their work. The debut is like ascending the musical Everest — pure creativity, pure love.

Before performing I never eat. Like a Buddhist monk who takes no food after midday. The stomach must be empty; then concentration is better.

On stage I live more fully than anywhere else. It's meditation, life in the present moment. A monk at a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where several years ago I completed vipassana, told me, “Meditation is prayer, and for true musicians prayer is their performance.” This viewpoint resonates with me. Often after a concert I don't remember what happened. It's like entering a trance or an operation under anaesthetic.

For me music is the language I speak. Sergei Kuryokhin once said, “I simply enjoy existing in the world of sounds.” Jimi Hendrix called music his religion. Music cannot change the entire world, but it constantly reminds us there's something greater than everyday problems, than destruction. Music changes us, and it has its own keys to each person's heart. I remember once after a concert a woman approached and said that the day before her father had died, she'd thought her life had completely lost meaning, but the concert healed her soul. “Which takes away life, music restores" — said Heinrich Heine (as Rachmaninoff repeated many times). For this it's worth doing what we do.

On 29 October last year in Budapest, we recorded Rachmaninoff's lost suite. Again the twenty-ninth — like the date of the Carnegie Hall debut. A fortunate date connecting significant events in my fate across months and years. The Suite in D minor is an early work of Rachmaninoff's, written in 1891 when he was still a conservatory student. Originally conceived as an orchestral suite, the orchestral score was lost, and the manuscript of the piano version, after more than a hundred years, was discovered in 2002 in the archives of the Glinka Museum of Music in Professor Ziloti's collection. In 1891 Rachmaninoff sent the notes to Tchaikovsky, but Tchaikovsky's servant lost them. The subsequent fate of the work until its appearance in the archives remains a complete mystery. With the blessing of the composer's great-granddaughter, Alexandra Rachmaninova, whom I met in Paris two years ago, I undertook the orchestration of this discovered composition. When you hear this work live for the first time, the sensation is comparable to the birth of a child.

If I had one last moment in this life, and they gave me one wish, I'd ask for a piano. I'd play whatever music came at that moment. An author considers his latest work the best; moreover, self-analysis hasn't yet spoiled it, the inner critic hasn't yet laid hands on it. I regard death as a further journey into the unknown, as a new adventure.

My grandfather often repeated a line by the Bengali poet and mystic Rabindranath Tagore, “Do not linger to gather flowers to keep them, but walk on, for flowers will keep themselves blooming all your way,” This is my credo too. Creativity as a way of life, music as religion, attention to detail as the power to create something genuine. Beauty demands labour, discipline, openness. Two minutes of written music per day becomes ten hours of music by year's end. When you're immersed in this flow, when your every action becomes part of a larger canvas, life ceases to be separated from creativity. It becomes creativity itself, a score, music.