“Look, if I wrote about Gia Kancheli that he is a genius, would it be ok?” I asked Georgy Danelia. 

“Simply genius?”

“Yes”.

“He will get hurt”.

“And what about calling him a ‘talented genius’?”

Danelia looks through his window that gives a view onto Chistye Prudy (Clear Ponds) in his Moscow flat, and he strokes his cats Afonya and Shket. He whistles a tune by Kancheli from his film “Tears Dropped” and walks around the room “wearing a straight back”, which is worn by few nowadays. He takes time for reflecting.

Realizing the seriousness of the question I sit quietly and worry a bit.

“Well, you may say it like this”.

By gosh!

Now I ask Kancheli, who composed music for Danelia’s films “Don’t you worry”, “Mimino”, “Kin-dza-dza” and “Passport”:  

“How did you work together, considering he is very musical?”  

“Well, it was like this. I would sit at the piano and show him the new piece of music. He kept silence. I showed that again and kept the accord. At that moment he approached me from my back and extended his hand and pushed a key between my fingers.”   

“Isn’t it better like this, Gia?” he would say. 

“That’s impossible, Gia!”

I played it again. And again he pushed the same piano key.

“Think of it!” he would say to me. 

“Then I came home and played the theme again. And I realized he had been damn right! “  

Kancheli looks out of the window. There is no Chistye Prudy, or his native Tbilisi sights there. There is a quiet street of Antwerp seen, where decoratively looking orthodox Jews are riding their bicycles in the rain, wearing plastic bags over their black wide-brimmed hats.    

Being a Georgian, Gia Kancheli has settled in this area not for becoming a servant for local customers and not for pushing buttons in the lift. He works here, composing his music under the contracts with the largest symphonic orchestras of the Old World. His music is played much and gets full houses. He gets admiring audiences, brilliant critics and the epithets that I and Danelia would never think up. And the best performers – Mstislav Rostropovich (late alas!), Yuri Bashmet, Gidon Kremer to name just a few – and the best orchestras from Germany, Holland, Belgium, Denmark, England play his music. If you take a look at a map of Europe, you’ll see all the countries where Kancheli’s music is performed.

In his small study we sit and listen to his recent records of the unbelievable depth.     

“Do you like it?” he asks me.

“Yes, I do” I say honestly, not having enough of vocabulary to express my impressions out of his music.  

Gia Kancheli lights a cigarette and looks at me a bit mistrustfully. And I decide I will write “simply a genius” about him. Let him take offence.