The Russian-Australian composer and pianist, Officer of the Order of Australia, whose diverse and engaging oeuvre mirrors her own diverse and wide-ranging life
Born in Tashkent in 1957, growing up on the banks of the Volga, she showed early promise on piano and was immediately enrolled in the pressure-cooked Soviet childhood, shuttled between piano lessons on the one hand and ice skating on the other. It was only when she was accepted into the famed Gnessin school in Moscow that she gave up the figure skating, age 14. There were four girls to a room and one piano. The practice schedule ruled life.
And then, a great piece of good luck. Her family was Jewish; and so her parents applied for, and were given permission by the authorities, to join the waves of Soviet Jewish émigrés embarking to Australia in the 1970s on. Her aunt and uncle were already there and when they arrived - such amazement! Beautiful houses – beautiful gardens – flowering jacarandas and eucalypts and loud Australian birds and food everywhere, more food than you ever could eat. She found friends in the Sydney underground scene, began to learn English and was immediately at home.
And so then it was on to study at the Sydney Conservatorium, first student to receive a double degree in piano and composition, before heading back to Europe to immerse herself in experimental modernism and the German theatre scene. Two years turned into 14. She married, she had children. And then one day decided to take them all home, without the husband, to the freer more laid-back landscapes of Australia. One of her best known works is her opera The Divorce
And that is when the commissions really began to arrive. Residences with all of Australia’s orchestras, commissions from overseas, collaborations with many of the world’s most renowned artists, writing in every single genre that there is – ballets, operas, piano it goes on, always with a good tune sprinkled on top.
“My life is about creating things that didn’t exist before”, she says. “and I make it my mission to make pieces that uplift you. That dream drives me every day to work as hard as I can for as long as I can”
Elena Kats-Chernin (1957 –)
MUSIC: Peggy's Rag
Sarah Cahill, piano
Presented by Anna Clyne
Written and produced by Charlotte Wilson for WMHT
