As anniversaries go, 20 seems to be a respectable number. When this website launched in 2003, Google was turning five years old and the Internet itself was merely twenty. The Dimitri Tiomkin official website celebrates 20 years!

Our first post, for the release by Film Score Monthly of Dimitri Tiomkin’s score for 36 Hours, available for the first time on CD in the FSM Golden Age Classics series, set the stage.

Reluctant to celebrate until we were more fully established, and to allow time for Olivia Tiomkin to host, our website launch party took place at the offices of Greenberg Traurig, LLP at The Water Garden in Santa Monica, California, on October 19, 2005. One year later, due to the popularity and increasing use of this site, we were in the process of restructuring the content to better handle usage, including search and display.

The creative force behind the site’s distinctive and classy look originates with Gabriel Nordyke, with updates in 2007, with Ciplex in 2011, and in 2020 thanks to Amy Stone at MOWA Design Group, the site has been streamlined and transformed.

As our stature grew, contacts made through our Web contact form, and later our “info@” email, resulted in some amazing collaborations.

In 2013, the Olympics Staging Agency contacted us using the Contact form asking if music by Dimitri Tiomkin could be used in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. With little more than 100 days before the games were set to open, Patrick Russ and Olivia Tiomkin reached out to work on the many details. The Closing Ceremonies (start YouTube video, below, around 46 minutes) brought home to Russia the music of native son Dimitri Tiomkin and an international audience was treated to nearly 10 minutes of thematic music composed for the Hollywood films It’s a Wonderful Life, Cyrano de Bergerac, and Giant.

The music is from the Silva Screen recording, “Dimitri Tiomkin: The Essential Film Music Collection,” produced by James Fitzpatrick, featuring arrangements by Patrick Russ and Christopher Palmer. Stage director Daniele Finzi Pasca said, “We wanted to start the ceremony with a piece of music that sounds very much like Hollywood music; music written for a Western.” Classic FM wrote: “Celebrating Russia’s classical history, Rachmaninov, Tiomkin, Schnittke and Khachaturian stole the show at the Winter Olympics closing ceremony.”

During the down days of the pandemic, our Contact form put us in touch with Nataliya Klevalina and resulted in “Dimitri Tiomkin: The Musical Wizard of Hollywood” at the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Center in Moscow in 2020 and 2021. Klevalina, in collaboration with the designer and artist Elena Abarenkova, curated an exhibition of photographs and documents honoring the legacy of the composer.

Hajji Baba sheet music

We continue to use the website for news and feature articles by Warren Sherk and to bring awareness to recordings, DVDs/Blu-rays, and publications, including the Dimitri Tiomkin Anthology and concert suites. Such as this delightful performance, below, with more than 3,400 views we just discovered by actress and singer Rena Strober sightreading the song “Hajji Baba” from the film The Adventures of Hajji Baba, music by Dimitri Tiomkin, lyrics by Ned Washington, accompanied by pianist Mike Farrell. Nat “King” Cole crooned the tune for the 1954 film from 20th Century Fox in Cinemascope.

What we’ve learned…

Backstage at the London Symphony Orchestra with Dimitri Tiomkin’s Academy Awards

As a four-time Academy Awards winner, Tiomkin is in a small class of composers who excelled at the art and craft of film scoring. His early career music for ballet—the sheer volume of his musical compositions from the late 1920s and early 1930s for Albertina Rasch and their Great American Ballet is mind boggling—and late career work as a film producer—beginning as early as 1954 and culminating with Mackenna’s Gold and Tchaikovsky almost 20 years later—continues to fascinate as we shed light on these topics.

Thanks first to Olivia Tiomkin for her unwavering support. And kudos to Patrick Russ for keeping the maestro’s music alive through concert performances and publications.

We our proud that this website consistently appears at the top of Google search, surrounded by behemoths such as Wikipedia and IMDb. How do we do it? We are the official site of Dimitri Tiomkin, we post month in and month out, and we have a dedicated following around the world that numbers around 10,000.

And all those images of Dimitri Tiomkin seen throughout the Internet? Many originated with this website and our Photo Gallery.

Thanks to you, our readers, and to the many devoted fans of Dimitri Tiomkin’s music, the Dimitri Tiomkin official website celebrates 20 years! We plan to continue to bring you news and feature articles.