MARIAVATENINA

ABOUT ME
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I grew up in St-Petersburg. It’s a city with very specific atmosphere.

Among the locals, every other person is either slightly eccentric or slightly mad, and in literature the city has often been described as mystical and surreal. Either way something about it is certainly odd.

My feelings for this city have always been on the edge of love and hate but I think my urge to express myself was partly due to its otherwise unbearable grey and rainy weather.

 

After going through multiple stages of traditional musical education in Russia , (from the age of 7 to the age of 25) I came to London where I chose to study film composition and music technology, as that was not taught anywhere in Russia at the time. Working with film directors has helped me to understand a few things about the way we perceive music. For instance, only when I started working in cinema did I discover the difference between the way a composer perceives their own music and how it affects their audience - the effect can sometimes feel contradictory.

Aside from music, I am inspired by art-house cinema (Tarkovsky, Bergman, Bresson, Fellini, Dardenne brothers); existential philosophy (Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, Camus); and by classical & modern art.

At the moment I am focusing on writing contemporary music, although I do continue to work on film or theatre projects from time to time.

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PROJECTS

 

New opera - Journey to the South 

I am working on an opera about the last year of Vincent Van Gogh's life.

The story begins in autumn and follows Van Gogh's correspondence with his brother Theo until the abrupt end of the artist's life in the summer of 1890.

The libretto is composed of extracts from Van Gogh's letters and is symbolically devided into 4 sections representing each season.

It's a second opera in collaboration with visual artists and co-director of De_Montage Art Collective Izabela Barszcz. 

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