Draft:Vladislav Soyfer

Vladislav Anatolyevich Soyfer (Владислав Анатольевич Сойфер, July 16 1961 — July 31 2021) was a composer, music teacher and translator.

Biography
Vladislav Soyfer was born in 1961 in Kharkiv, Ukraine (then - Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic) in a family of engineers. He spent his childhood in Tashkent, but later moved to Moscow.

After school he entered the Moscow Land Development Institute, but he left it soon and entered the Schnittke Moscow State Institute instead. There he received lessons from the blind musician and music theorist Vasily Ivanovich Gorbatov. At the same time he played in a military band.

Soyfer studied as a composer at the Moscow conservatory (1984-1989), but mainly was educated as a private pupil (1986-1989) of Romanian-born composer Philip Herschkowitz / Filip Herşcovici (successor of New Vienna tradition, the pupil of Alban Berg and Anton von Webern). Those lessons were decisive in his musical development and his musical work continued the traditions of the Second Viennese School.

He was also educated in the Moscow State University (1989-1996) as a free listener on the philosophy and phlilology faculties (this included lectures of Mikhail Gasparov, Sergey Averintsev, Alexander Dobrokhotov and others).

During the years he lived in Moscow he collaborated with the Studio of New Music.. , the New Names foundation, and also tutored and arranged music for various organizations (for example, "the Premiere ensemble", formerly called "the New Names", with which he intensively cooperated in the years 1996-1999). One of his friends was the composer Faradzj Karaev.

In 2007 Soyfer and his daughter moved to Costa Rica. He continued to give lessons in solfeggio, harmony, piano, composition, orchestration and musical form, and was also making musical arrangements and editing scores for several orchestras of the country, including the Symphonic Orchestra of Heredia (since 2012) and the National Symphonic Orchestra of Costa Rica. His arrangements of Schubert (5 songs) for children's choir and chamber orchestra got performed in April 2017 by the choir and orchestra of the SINEM (National System of Musical Education).

Eddie Mora, a composer with whom Soyfer often collaborated, said about him:"'Vladislav Soyfer managed to incorporate the most important requisites for configuring a score and presenting it in any kind of musical grouping with the required transparency and clarity. This is a thorough work that takes a lot of time, layout and musical editing.'"In 2021 Vladislav Soyfer left the capital of Costa Rica with his daughter and they returned to Playas del Coco, a small beach town where they have lived earlier.

On July 31st 2021 Vladislav Soyfer passed away after a heart attack at the age of 60.

Selected compositions

 * Choral works:
 * "Гроза прошла" ("The storm has passed"), on the verses of Tyutchev.
 * Два канона (Two canons), on the verses of Lomonosov.
 * Orchestra:
 * 7 haikus: Rain in the bamboo forest, The ivy twines around the hanging bridge, The cicada is floating down the river on a yellow leaf, The song and the death of the cicada, The moon is rising over the abandoned village, Sparrows in the storm, Autumn evening. First performed in April 2024.
 * "Canción con movimiento" (A song with movement") on the verses of Lorca (2014).
 * Ensemble and other:
 * Haiku for soprano, piano, flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, harp, two violins, viola and cello (2012).
 * 3 old-style polyphonic miniatures for oboe and clarinet (2011).
 * Adagio for 17 string instruments (2006).
 * Fantasia and scherzo for piano and violin (2010).
 * Langsam und Schmachtend. A postlude for Bass clarinet and cello (2010).
 * Piano:
 * Variations for piano (2014).
 * Selected piano music (includes "a small Sonate", "Three eleven-bar bagatelles" , Five motives ), 2010. Published in 2024.
 * Miniatures for piano (2012).
 * Flute:
 * Three little poems for flute (1997-2011).
 * Cello:
 * Three Greek poems for cello (2010).

Performances
During the time he lived in Costa Rica, many of his arrangements, including those of Bach and Schubert, were performed in different halls of Costa Rica.

On April 20th, 2015 Vladislav Soyfer's "Canción con movimiento" ("A song with movement", on the verses by Lorca) was performed by the Azerbaijan State Symphonic Orchestra at the Qara Qarayev Music Festival and in December 2016, Soyfer's "reconstruction" of Mozart's concerto for 4 wind soloists with orchestra was played at the Moscow Conservatory.

After Soyfer's death, some of his music was performed for the first time: on September 21, 2022 "Three eleven-bar Bagatelles" were performed in Moscow, at the Library named after Bogolubov, and in April 2023, "Five Motives". The same pieces also were performed in 2024 in different Moscow halls. On June 4, 2023, "Three Bagatelles" arranged for orchestra by Faradzh Karaev, were performed at the Beethoven Hall of Bolshoi Theatre by the theatre's chamber orchestra, conducted by Mikhail Tsinman.

In 2023 his arrangment of Grieg's 8 lyric pieces was performed in Italy. . And in 2024, the "7 haikus" were performed in Costa Rica, conducted by Alejandro Gutiérrez.

Pupils
Vladislav Soyfer had many pupils: some of them have continued their studies abroad, in different countries. The pianist and conductor Luis Castillo-Briceño said in an 2022 interview:

"One of the people who influenced me a lot was my teacher, Vladislav Soyfer (he is no longer alive), who introduced me to the world of conducting when I was 14 years old. We come from a tradition that stretches back to Schönberg; and this way of thinking and seeking knowledge has always shaped my position in art."

Some of the other pupils of Soyfer are: Alina Ibragimova (violinist), Gianca Liano (composer from Guatemala) cellist Marco Gutierrez, pianists Giuseppe Gil, César Salazar, Rodrigo Picado, and many others.

He was a friend of Rinat Ibragimov (double bass virtuoso, who was the principal bass of the London Symphony Orchestra) and at some time was giving him lessons, as well as his daughter. On September 2, 2020, when Ibragimov passed away from COVID-19, Vladislav Soyfer translated a short Chinese poem in his tribute.

Linguistic work
Literature was another important part of Soyfer's life. He wrote poetry and translated literary work from multiple languages into Russian. In December 2022, a book with some of his works was published in Jerusalem. Called "Jacob's Ladder", it contains some of his essays, translations and short poems. "In spite of what the title might make you might, it's not a religious book. It's an essay about culture and civilization - and about falling out of them; some parodic retellings of biblical and ancient Greek verses; some very deep reflections on Chinese philosophy, on Shakespeare and Lorca, on politics and history of the past and the present..."

(Rachel Torpusman, the publisher of the book) Translations made by Vladislav Soyfer include:

Fragments of W. Shakespeare's plays and works of other English poets (P. B. Shelley, E. Lear, T. S. Eliot, A. Tennyson, W. Blake, E. Lazarus);

from German - P. Gerhardt, P. Celan, S. George, M. Luther, M. Wesendonck, G. Trakl, F. Rückert, H. Heine, R. M. Rilke, H. Bethge, J. Burmeister, J. Rist, G. C. Lehms, C. Neumann, J. Franck and fragments of the text of Bach's St Matthew Passion (author unknown);

from Spanish - poems of F. G. Lorca and Spanish romances; from Italian - T. Tasso and Lorenzo Da Ponte (two fragments from opera's librettos);

from Latin - Catullus, Virgil; from Greek and ancient Greek - Simonides, Heraclitus.

In the last years Soyfer started to study Chinese and has translated poems of various ancient Chinese poets and philosophers: Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Sun Tzu, Du Fu, Li Bai, Li Yu, Wang Wei, Pei Di and others.

One of his latest works was a translation of the first chapter of Lun Yu.

Most of these translations were published in the author's blog in Dreamwidth.

Books
"Jacob's Ladder" / published by Rachel Torpusman in Jerusalem, 2022. ISBN 978-965-7006-11-5

Memory
In 2022 Gianca Liano wrote a composition dedicated to the memory of Vladislav Soyfer, called "The shore" (Orilla). It was performed in the Milan Conservatory.

Links
Vladislav Soyfer on IMSLP:

https://imslp.org/wiki/Category:Soyfer,_Vladislav