Jānis Petraškevičs (b. 1978) studied composition with Pēteris Plakidis at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music in Rīga (1996-2003). He continued his compositional studies with Sven-David Sandström at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm (1998–1999), and later took postgraduate studies in composition with Ole Lützow-Holm at the University of Gothenburg (2004–2007). In 2014, he defended his doctoral thesis in musicology at the Latvian Academy of Music on the specific notion of multi-dimensionality in music by Stockhausen, Boulez, Ferneyhough, Carter and Ligeti. In addition, he has attended courses under the guidance of Boguslaw Schaeffer, Brian Ferneyhough, Fausto Romitelli, Luca Francesconi, Chaya Czernowin, Steven Kazuo Takasugi and Richard Barrett, among others.
Among his honours are First Prize in the competition of the Association of Baltic Academies of Music in Hamburg (2003), the Carl Larsson Scholarship (2006), the Fellowship of the Civitella Ranieri Foundation (2013–2014) and the Latvian Grand Music Award for the best new composition of the year (2014, for Darkroom; in 2023 his clarinet concerto Long Walks was nominated for the same award). His music has been performed at the Biennale di Venezia (2008), the ISCM World Music Days (2008, Vilnius), the concert series Musica Viva in Munich (2012), Warsaw Autumn (2013), the Archipel (2015), the Ultraschall Berlin (2015), Donaueschinger Musiktage (2018) and elsewhere. He has received commissions from a number of important contemporary music institutions: trop proche/trop loin was written for the Ensemble InterContemporain (2001) and Darkroom for the Ensemble Modern (2011). In 2014, he was co-commissioned by the Ensemble Modern and Wigmore Hall to write a string octet; thus gefährlich dünn was created. The orchestral piece Dead Wind was commissioned for the final concert of Donaueschinger Musiktage 2018 (premiered by SWR Symphonieorchester, conducted by Peter Rundel). He has collaborated with Ryoko Aoki, Irvine Arditti, Robert Fleitz, Guntars Freibergs, Anna Gāgane, Yoshiko Hannya, Clemens Heil, Guntis Kuzma, Monika Mattiesen, Kaspars Putniņš, Carol Robinson, Normunds Šnē, Anu Tali, Takashi Yamane, Michael Wendeberg, der/gelbe/klang, Ensemble Ictus, ensemble-no, Ensemble SurPlus, Ensemble 32, Ex Novo Ensemble, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Nieuw Ensemble, Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra, Phidias Trio Tokyo, Quadra, Sinfonietta Riga, Latvian Radio Choir group and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, among others. His articles on music have been published by two Riga based magazines Mūzikas Saule and Rīgas Laiks for the past two decades. Petraškevičs has lectured on aspects of contemporary music at the Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music since 2011 and was appointed Senior Lecturer in composition in 2017.
Photo: Jānis Bērziņš