Evgueni Galperine was born in
Chelyabinsk, in the
Urals, where he spent his early childhood before moving to
Kyiv with his parents and his brother Sacha, who was barely one year old at the time. Four years later, the family moved to
Moscow where Evgueni continued his studies, first at a conservatory and then at the
Gnessin State Musical College. At the age of 16, the whole family moved to
France where Evgueni studied composition at the Boulogne Conservatory. He was admitted to the
Conservatoire de Paris in 2000, where he studied music theory and composition. He then went on to compose for concerts, theatre and advertising. Since 2003, he has devoted much of his work to film music, first as a solo artist, then as a duo (since 2009) with his brother Sacha. The career of the two brothers began with the production of the soundtrack for the 2010 film
The Big Picture by
Éric Lartigau. If some compositions reflect, by the choice of instrumentation and rhythms, their Slavic roots (as in
La Famille Bélier,
The Family or
Nine Lives), others are detached from them to feed themselves in an autonomous way. Minimalist trends, also influenced by the composer
Arvo Pärt, are apparent, too. The brothers' soundtrack to
Andrey Zvyagintsev's film
Loveless received the
European Film Academy (EFA) award for the best film score of the year in 2017 and
IndieWire ranked it among the top ten scores of the year. In addition to European cinema where Evgueni has collaborated with directors such as
Andrey Zvyagintsev,
François Ozon,
Marjane Satrapi,
Asghar Farhadi,
Luc Besson, he has also collaborated with American directors such as
Barry Sonnenfeld (
The Addams Family and
Men in Black) or
Barry Levinson (
Rain Man,
Sleepers and
Wag The Dog). In addition, his and his brother’s music is often used in films as additional music:
Jacques Audiard's
Rust and Bone,
Gary Ross'
The Hunger Games,
Night Shyamalan's
Split, etc. In 2017, when Galperine was ready to recommit to contemporary composition – and to begin work on
Theory of Becoming (finally realized and released in 2022) –
Andrey Zvyagintsev asked him to contribute music for the film
Loveless. The director asked Evgeni to write the music without reading the script and without seeing the film. In regard to this, Evgeni said "Once you find yourself writing music from three sentences, without images, you are no longer a composer of film music. You have no reference points other than yourself." The film was awarded the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival. Among his "emotional influences", Galperine cites
Modest Mussorgsky,
Dmitri Shostakovich, and
Claude Debussy and, among more recent composers,
Arvo Pärt,
György Ligeti and
Steve Reich. == Discography ==