Victoria Poleva was born in Kyiv on 11 September 1962 to a family of musicians. She studied with, respectively, Ivan Karabyts and Levko Kolodub at the Kyiv Conservatory, where she herself taught composition from 1990 to 2005.
Her earlier works, such as the ballet Gagaku, Transform for large orchestra and Anthem for chamber orchestra, favour avant-garde and polystylistic aesthetics. From the late 1990s, she became ever more drawn to spiritual themes and musical simplicity and so developed a style which has latterly been identified as ‘sacred minimalism’.
Her works have been commissioned by numerous exponents of new music, not least Gidon Kremer in 2005 for Sempre Primavera and 2010 for The Art of Instrumentation, and the Kronos Quartet for Walking on Waters in 2013. In 2009, her Ode to Joy was heard at a concert to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Richard Whitehouse