Vladislav Shoot (Russian: Владислав Алексеевич Шуть, Vladislav Alekseyevich Shut' (also spelled Chout, Schut, Sciut, Shut or Szut); 3 March 1941 – 9 March 2022) was a Russian-British composer of contemporary classical music. Born in Voznesensk, Soviet Union, now Ukraine, he moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1990s, settling on the artists' estate of Dartington Hall.[1]
Biography
He was born Vladislav Shut in Voznesensk, Soviet Union, to Valentina (née Nizovaya) and Alexei Shut, an officer in the navy. He was raised in Sevastopol, where he attended School N14.[1]
He married the artist Irina Karpey in 1970.[1] His son Eliahu (Eli) Shoot is also a composer, teaching at Tulane University, and his daughter Veronika (Nika Shoot) is a pianist.[4]
Shoot's works met with much admiration in the West from the 1980s onward. He preferred smaller ensembles, up to a chamber orchestra, which he tied into sound compositions or groups of overlapping sound layers. Even his symphonies, excepting the High Cross Symphony (1998), are chamber symphonies. He retained serial processes, used post-Romantic elements, and quoted composers of the past, with Alban Berg as the clearest influence.[2] Shoot allowed performers of his works a certain freedom of interpretation within the bounds of a controlled aleatoric technique.[6]
His music has been performed at numerous venues and festivals throughout Europe, as well as in South Korea and the United States. The music written in the UK has been performed by leading British ensembles and orchestras, including the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and Sinfonia 21.[7] An 80th birthday celebration concert took place on 29 June 2021 at St George's, Bloomsbury in London.[8]
Selected works
Orchestral
Sinfonia da Camera No. 3, flute, oboe, 2 ensembles (percussion, strings), 1978
^McBurney, Gerard. "Vladislav Shoot", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 23, pp. 275–6
Holopova, Valentina. Secrets of the Moscow Composition School in Vladislav Shoot's "Pure Music" in: «Ex oriente...III»: Eight Composers from the former USSR, ed. V. Tsenova (studia slavica musicologica, vol. 31) (Berlin: Ernst Kuhn, 1997), ISBN3-928864-92-0
Lobanova, Marina. Musical Styla and Genre: History and Modernity (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000), pp. 167–9.
McBurney, Gerard. "Vladislav Shoot", The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed. S. Sadie and J. Tyrrell (London: Macmillan, 2001), vol. 23, pp. 275–6.