Biography
Kiszko's family hails from an area of Poland which is now Belarus and from Leeds, England. Kiszko began his music studies at age seven and was accepted at the Leeds City College of Music at age ten.
He studied music composition with Duncan Druce at Bretton Hall College (University of Leeds) and filmmaking with George Brandt at the University of Bristol, where he directed and scored the short film Skokholm Light. He later studied with Wyndham Thomas at Bristol to complete his PhD thesis on the growth of balalaika orchestras and the migration of the balalaika.
Kiszko's interests in film music were nurtured by veteran film composer Edward Williams, who was mentored by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams and British conductor Muir Mathieson. Kiszko assisted Williams from 1979 onwards when he began work on co-producing Williams' album Music for Life on Earth for the BBC David Attenborough series of the same name. They also created a touring live performance multi-media group – creating performances where instrumentalists transformed sound and video image in real time. The group has grown into the successful music and multi-media organisation Elektrodome.
Amongst Kiszko's well-known works are many of his film and TV scores: The Killing of John Lennon, The Uninvited, The Human Sexes, Alien Empire, Battle of the Sexes, Realms of the Russian Bear, Land of the Eagle, Omnibus, Newsround, Wildlife on One and The Natural World. Several of his scores have won awards, including Best Music Video for Dreamworks, an eight-minute natural history promo made by the BBC for Steven Spielberg. He has also released eight albums featuring major European orchestras.
Kiszko's popularity increased as a result of introducing the BBC Natural History Unit to the possibilities for sampling indigenous instruments overseas on Realms of the Russian Bear. He successfully pioneered the technique by recording instrumentalists from the former Soviet republics at the Melodia Recording Studios, Moscow in 1991. The recordings were subsequently inputted into keyboard samplers and published by Northstar Productions as 'RUSSIAN MASTERS' https://www.northstarsamples.com/RussianEIII.html. Later, his interest in the palette and epic scale of symphonic scores enabled him to introduce the BBC Natural History Unit to the use of Eastern European orchestras in the mid-nineties. In 2008 Kiszko returned to the electro-acoustic palette of his earlier works in the score for Andrew Piddington's feature film The Killing of John Lennon.
Kiszko's film music draws on an eclectic range of styles and devices whilst maintaining an original voice. Amongst his interests are the symphony orchestra, electronic music, the use of autochthonous instruments and the subliminal effects of the film score. He has also worked in the rock and folk arenas with band Lies Damned Lies (as a Navajo flute player) and with Maddy Prior on a collaborative score for the BBC Wildlife on One film Shadow of the Hare.
His interest in the live interplay of image and music has led him to experiment and create with Soundbeam, an ultrasonic series of beams that act as invisible keyboards in space. With each beam containing up to 128 invisible divisions, each division can become the start and stop button to turn on and project a video sequence, a sequence of a stills or trigger a sequence or note of music. His work, in conjunction with The Soundbeam Project, led to the creation of Inua, a live performance piece which won 2004 Composer of the Year (Community and Education) from the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters.
As well as his film and television work, Kiszko's major concert works include two cantatas: Sea Star with a libretto by poet Anne Ridler OBE, and A Radius of Curves – a work with his own libretto and accompanying film – which tells the story of the construction of Brunel's Great Western Railway.
Kiszko completed his PhD thesis, "The Origins and Place of the Balalaika in Russian Culture, its Migration to the USA, and the Dissemination of Balalaika Orchestras in America with Particular Reference to the Kasura and Kutin Collections at the University of Illinois," in 1999. His research paper on the instrument, "The Balalaika – a Reappraisal", was the first to be published in the West since 1900 and appeared in The Galpin Society Journal. He later wrote the entry for the balalaika in The New Grove Dictionary of Music.
Since 2010 Kiszko has also pursued his interests in environmentalism and wrote two collections of poetry on eco themes: "Green Poems for a Blue Planet" and "Verse for the Earth" both illustrated by Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park. Kiszko's one man show based on the books has been performed in China, Dubai, Los Angeles, Malta, three times in India, around the UK, and at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. In 2016 the University of Bristol awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters for his work.