Boris Yoffe

Born in St. Petersburg in 1968, Boris Yoffe initially studied violin but turned to composing early, premiering his first works with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in 1983 and going on to play bass in a Pink Floyd cover band in the Red Army. After completing composition studies at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv University, he moved to Karlsruhe, Germany to study with Wolfgang Rihm in 1997. Around that time, the neoromantic composer began composing a series of very short "lyric poems" for string quartet, given an extensive performance at ZKM in Karlsruhe in May of 2003. In addition to the quartets, his more notable compositions include the chamber opera "Esther de Racine", which premiered in Basel in 2006, and an opera in Yiddish based on a story by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. The Baden-Baden Philharmonic has commissioned several works from Yoffe, including the "Prince Cuckoo" pantomime that was later revived in Augsburg. He has received the award of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts (2000). His pieces have been broadcast by Südwestrundfunk, the BBC, and the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation, among others. Yoffe is a prolific theoretical writer as well as an expert on Romantic music, and his essays are a staple of the Russian internet forum "Musical Semantics," which also provided the title for his most recent CD.