Andrei Medvedev

Andrei Nikolayevich Medvedev was born on 3 October 1952 in Leningrad, now St Petersburg, in the Soviet Union. He trained at the Leningrad State Institute of Culture named after N. K. Krupskaya, now the St Petersburg State Institute of Culture, in its department of the musical art of variety. He graduated in 1977 as a conductor of variety orchestras.

Little has been published about his family background or childhood.

Medvedev worked for many years alongside Anatoly Badkhen, the founder of the Leningrad Concert Orchestra, and was regarded as his pupil and successor. Petersburg-Concert, the city's state concert organisation, wrote that Badkhen's student could handle musical material of any difficulty and that his interpretations and arrangements were known for their depth and emotional intensity.

In the 1980s he became known to a national audience through the television music programmes Song of the Year, Morning Mail and Blue Light. As a composer he wrote songs with the poets Olga Klimenkova, Lev Alekseyev and Yevgeny Raevsky. His best known pieces of the decade included Portrait of Celentano, Someone Else's Wife, The Deceiver and Attraction. Mikhail Boyarsky sang his Birthday, Lyudmila Senchina his Farewell to the Sea, and Igor Sklyar recorded several of his songs, among them White Flowers, Michel and Five Corners. He also wrote music for theatre, television and documentary film.

Over several decades he arranged and conducted programmes and author concerts of the composers Andrei Petrov, Veniamin Basner and David Tukhmanov, festivals including Spring of Romance, Festival of Romance, Petersburg Autumn and Vivat, Kino Rossii, the Andrei Petrov All-Russian Composers Competition and the Grand Prix international vocal competition. He worked on music for the St Petersburg International Economic Forum and the city's 300th anniversary celebrations in 2003, and on solo concerts by Igor Krutoy, Larisa Dolina, Tamara Gverdtsiteli, Valery Meladze, Vasily Gerello, Alessandro Safina and Dina Garipova, among many others. Georges Moustaki asked him to arrange and conduct the orchestra for a festival programme in Montauban, France.

From 2019 he was artistic director and chief conductor of the St Petersburg Variety Symphony Orchestra, the creative successor of Badkhen's Leningrad Concert Orchestra. Under him the orchestra presented large shows such as The Beatles Symphony, Rock Nostalgia, Superdrive, Best Melodies of Foreign Variety and All This SymphoJazz, which Petersburg-Concert said regularly filled halls. In October 2026 the orchestra, still under his artistic direction, performed at the gala marking the 95th anniversary of Petersburg-Concert.

Medvedev kept his private life out of public view, and details of his family were not reported in the coverage of his death. Petersburg-Concert's general director, Yekaterina Artyushkina, described him as an extraordinarily talented, intelligent, deep and modest man, and recalled him as a patient presence at rehearsals who could explain with a single gesture what others needed pages of words to say. She offered condolences to his family and loved ones.

Andrei Medvedev died in St Petersburg on 16 October 2026, aged 74, after a long illness. His death was announced the same day by Petersburg-Concert and by the St Petersburg Committee for Culture, and it was reported by Delovoy Peterburg, News.ru, Petrograd.ru and Peterburgsky Dnevnik.

In her tribute Yekaterina Artyushkina called his death an irreplaceable loss for the musical life of the city. A farewell ceremony was arranged for 20 October 2026 from 11:00 to 13:00 at the Catherine Assembly hall of Petersburg-Concert on the Griboyedov embankment, with burial at the Smolensky Cemetery at 14:00.

Medvedev is remembered as a keeper and renewer of the Leningrad and St Petersburg school of variety symphonic music associated with Anatoly Badkhen. Petersburg-Concert called the St Petersburg Variety Symphony Orchestra the best variety orchestra in the city and one of the leading ensembles in the country, and credited him with setting new standards for the genre while preserving its heritage.

His songs of the 1980s remain part of the repertoire of performers such as Mikhail Boyarsky and Igor Sklyar, and his arrangements were heard in concerts by many of the leading names of Soviet and Russian popular music.