These days, though, he tends to stay away from the silver screen, instead creating an impressive number of works in different fields of music and the visual arts.
"I seem to have given up writing film music ?€” or rather the film industry, the 'culture-business-film world,' has given up on me," said Nyman, speaking by phone from his home in London this week. "So basically I'm writing solely the music that I seriously love writing."
The kind of music relished by Nyman, who will perform with the Michael Nyman Band at the Tschaikovsky Concert Hall on Saturday, varies enormously, from operas to music for large-scale stage productions, such as a "big kind of circus-type show" in Spain that he is currently crafting, and even scores for video games. He also enjoys putting music to poetry.
The Michael Nyman Band performed a selection of the leading man's famous film music on its last visit to Moscow in 2006. This time around, he is planning to concentrate on works from his two most recent CDs: "Mozart 252" and "8 Lust Songs: I sonetti lussuriosi," both released on Nyman's own MN Records earlier this year.
8 Lust Songs is a song cycle based on "16th-century Italian pornographic texts by a fantastic writer named Pietro Aretino," said Nyman, "These are very sexual, very sensuous, powerful, lustful songs ?€” which I think might be interesting to sophisticated Russian audiences." Australian-born opera singer Marie Angel will sing.
"Mozart 252" is a compilation and re-recording of music written by Nyman over the last 30 years based on Mozart compositions.
The classically trained Nyman, who wrote a score to Dziga Vertov's 1929 silent film "Man with a Movie Camera" released by The British Film Institute on DVD in 2002, is now writing soundtracks to two more films by the avant-garde Soviet director. "The Sixth Part of the World" and "The Eleventh Year."
Never short on side projects, Nyman has branched out into photography, publishing a boxed book of his photographs titled "Sublime," and he is currently busy editing a series of 30 videos, running from two to 45 minutes, that he screens at exhibition spaces and sometimes at movie theaters.
The last couple of years have have brought the award-winning composer two more important honors. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Warwick last year and made a CBE, a title bestowed by the British monarchy, in June.
"It's all kind of ironic," he said. "Why was I awarded it now? Why wasn't I awarded it 15 years ago when my film music made me one of the most famous composers in the world with 'The Piano'?"
"The whole question of timing is very amusing in these cases, and you kind of wonder who has an agenda for what reason to give me this award. So it's mixed. There's great pride and great cynicism combined."
The Michael Nyman Band performs at 7 p.m. on Saturday at Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, located at 4/31 Triumfalnaya? Ploshchad.? M.? Mayakovskaya.
Tel. 232-5353, 699-3957.
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