It was a wonderful, as well as a challenging, experience I had with Golden Horde. Having to write medieval epic music for battles and suspense scenes was something I had never done before, and I was intimidated by it. In addition, as the series is in Russian, there were no subtitles or any translation on the cues I was scoring, so when immediate help was not available, I had to rely on my intuition. I learned a lot from this work, and I am glad it all went well in the end.

I love lush strings, intimate-sounding pianos, the cello and the clarinet. I aim to express emotions with my music, and I am attracted by instruments that have a deeply expressive range and articulations. A signature sound is something a composer develops after a certain time of experimenting with various instrumentations and experience with what works and what does not. I believe I still have time to discover a lot of things.

I am the kind of composer that works with intuition and empathy and I need to communicate as much as possible with the director and gather as much information about the story as possible. I do a lot of research before starting to write and what inspires me the most are conversations about the story and the characters of the film, not just a script. While I let all theinformation sink in, I compose inside my head before I put my fingers on the piano.

All the films I can remember until now are the ones that had a strong emotional impact to me. The reason is that their music was not only beautiful but also memorable. John Williams, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Henri Mancini, are only a few of the brilliant composers that created such strong emotional connections between their music and the audience, with films that last through time. I miss that a lot in recent films and I have made a conscious decision follow that path with my music.

All my albums are inspired from my life and each of them has a certain concept.

On Ivory, I was inspired from the quote by Albert Camus “There is a life, there is a death, and there’s beauty and melancholy in between”. Making albums is liberating for me as I feel free to express myself without any instructions or limitations. I have learned that this kind of freedom can help to develop your personality as a musician and to discover your own sound eventually.

Interview by Valerie Manahan