Boris Filanovsky (b. 1968, Leningrad) is a Russian composer whose work pairs rigorous construction with a restless, theatrical imagination. He graduated from the St. Petersburg Rimsky-Korsakov Conservatory in 1995, studying composition with Boris Tishchenko, and trained further at the young-composers seminars in Ivanovo under Sergei Berinsky and at IRCAM in Paris.

From 2000 to 2012 he was artistic director of eNsemble at the Pro Arte Institute in St. Petersburg, where he built one of Russia’s most active platforms for new music, commissioning and premiering roughly a hundred works by younger composers through projects such as the annual Pythian Games. His own catalogue ranges across instrumental, vocal and stage music, including the operas Three Four, on texts by the poet Lev Rubinstein, and The Sverlians, staged at Moscow’s Electrotheatre Stanislavsky and nominated for a Golden Mask. Since 2005 he has also performed as an “extreme” vocalist and reciter of his own pieces.

His music is marked by a kind of sonic realism, deconstructing familiar material to reflect, often pointedly, on musical and social convention. Filanovsky has lived in Berlin since 2013.