Andrey Slonim

Andrey Yevseyevich Slonim was born in 1949 in Tashkent into a well-known Tashkent family: his father was the architect Yevsey Slonim, his grandfather the physician Moisey Slonim, one of the founders of Tashkent University, and his aunt the astronomer Yudif Slonim.

In 1974 he graduated from the Ostrovsky Tashkent Theatre and Art Institute. For more than forty years he also taught: he ran the opera class at the opera studio of the State Conservatory of Uzbekistan and a course in operatic acting at his own institute, and on invitation gave master classes for singers in Ryazan.

He began directing in Moscow, where at the music theatre studio of the Gnessin Academy of Music he staged “The Witch” by Vl. Vlasov and Vl. Fere (1984) and Tchaikovsky’s “The Queen of Spades” (1986). Since 1990 he has been a stage director at the Navoi Bolshoi Theatre in Tashkent, where he has put on operas by Verdi, Rossini, Mozart, Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky; Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor”, “The Magic Flute” and Mascagni’s “Cavalleria rusticana” were first heard in Uzbekistan in his productions.

His repertoire includes national works: his version of Mukhtar Ashrafi’s opera “Dilorom” (1992), N. Zakirov’s opera “The Path to the Throne”, drawn from “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”, for which Slonim was librettist, director and designer, and the first stagings of Feodor Yanov-Yanovsky’s “The Princess and the Pea” (2013) and M. Bafoev’s opera-ballet “Khamsa” (2017). As a designer he created the sets and costumes for the ballets “Spartacus” and “Poetic Miniatures” at the Navoi Theatre and, for Japan’s Toyota City Ballet, “Don Quixote”.

Outside opera Slonim is known as a poet and reciter. His poems appear in republican journals, collections and almanacs; he compiles evenings and concert-compositions that join music with verse, from Pushkin to twentieth-century poets, and reads poetry at them himself. He is a co-chair of the literary association “Istoki” and the organizer of a youth theatre studio at the Cultural Centre of Germans of Uzbekistan, where he staged Goethe’s “Faust”, Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, Grass’s “Land of November” and “Hoffmanniana”, based on Hoffmann.

Since 2010 he has headed the “Sretenie” ensemble of soloists at the Tashkent and Uzbekistan Eparchy, and in 2015–2019 and in 2025 he staged evenings in Moscow in memory of the tenor Ivan Kozlovsky. Slonim is an Honoured Worker of Culture of Uzbekistan (2006) and an Honoured Art Worker of the Republic of Uzbekistan (2016).