Biography

Music exists beyond the scope of academic forms or novel trends when the sense comes to the fore. Pushing the boundaries through different techniques, seeking new sounding and forms where the idea can settle. Or coming back to pure simplicity. It is always a lonely journey.

Svyatoslav Lunyov is a Ukrainian composer.

Born on April 19, 1964 in Kyiv, Ukraine. He began his music education at the age of seventeen, discovering the world’s music classics. In 1986 he gets his first degree in engineering. In 1988: aged twenty-four, Lunyov admitted to Kyiv State Conservatory and started his education in composition. Then he continued there for his Post-graduate studies from 1998-2001. Since 2000, Lunyov is a lecturer in the faculty of composition at the Music Information Technologies Department of Kyiv Conservatory.

For his entire career, Lunyov encompassed all genres of serious music, including chamber, choral, vocal, piano, electroacoustic, and film music. In the last years, Lunyov has explored writing electroacoustic, symphonic, and ensemble works. 

One of the most important composer’s works for the last time is Double Concerto for Percussion, Piano, and Symphony Orchestra “BACK TO BACK” (2023). One of the most massive and complicated scores ever written by Svyatoslav Lunyov (maybe can only be compared to “PANTA RHEI”), this work includes four parts. I “Countdown”, II “Trishula”, III Discord, and IV “Telenka”.

Besides that, during the full-scale war that began on February 24, 2022, Svyatoslav Lunyov created many new pieces. Among them are electronic“POST”(2022), and also a vocal cycle “FIERCE JANUARY ’23” (2023) that was written on Ukrainian poems and performed by Ukrainian artists Viktoria Vitrenko and Antonii Baryshevskyi.

Also, Lunyov has created an unexpectedly “inappropriate” piano cycle called “PAINKILLER STUDIES” (2022), where he continues developing his own so to-say dance music genre, which is partly derived from “NEW RUSSIAN DANCES”.

In 2017 his musical open-air performance “WITNESS”, dedicated to the 75th anniversary of the Babyn Yar tragedy, received the Bronze Cannes Lion at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

Among the performers of his compositions: the National Symphony Orchestra (Ukraine), the Camerata Kyiv Chamber Orchestra (Ukraine), “Kyiv” Municipal Choir (Ukraine), the National Culture University Choir (Ukraine), “Ricochet” Contemporary Music Ensemble (Ukraine), the vocal ensemble “Alter Ratio” (Ukraine), “MusikFabrik” Contemporary Music Ensemble (Germany), “Silk Road” Duet (Germany),  “Trinity Wall Street Choir” (the USA), “Sinfonietta Sankt Gallen” (Switzerland), and many others.

Conductors: Volodymyr Sirenko, Vyacheslav Blinov, Viktor Ploskina, Valery Matyuchin, Volodymyr Runchak (Ukraine), Veronique Laqroix (Canada), Theodore Kuchar (USA), Herman Engels (Belgium), Mikheil Menabde (Georgia/Ukraine), Olga Prykhodko (Ukraine).