Born in 1953, he studied in music colleges at Krasnodar and St Petersburg (with Galina Ustvolskaya). In 1986 he graduated from the Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in St Petersburg, where he studied composition with A. Mnazakanov. Having lived in St Petersburg from 1974 to 1984, he then moved to Karelia where he teaches in a village music school.
His ballet Magrittomania, commissioned and premiered in 1999 by San Francisco Ballet, was subsequently performed by the Bolshoi Ballet Company in Moscow. His First Piano Concerto won a prize at the Prokofiev International Composers’ Competition (1999). His music has been heard in Russia, Belarus, Germany, Greece, Finland, Switzerland and the United States.

Selected works: Piano Concerto No. 1 (1985), Amadeus for flute and chamber orchestra (1986), >From Venedict Erofeev for narrator and nine musicians (1988), Quasi una cantata for chamber orchestra (1990), Piano Sonata No. 2 Faol (1998), Magrittomania, ballet (1998), Formulae of Spring for violin and ensemble (2001), Novgorod Concerto for piano
(4 hands) and strings (2002), Seven Stops in South-East Asia for violin, cello and orchestra (2003), Sąngó for five instruments (2003), Khlebnikov-Concerto for clarinet, female voice, violin, marimba and orchestra (2005); incidental music for film and theatre productions, music for children.