In early childhood, Yuri Falik was often present at orchestra rehearsals and opera productions, easily memorizing and humming the music he heard.

[8] Though he had a very busy life as a cellist, Falik never lost his desire to compose music, and in 1959 he was accepted to the composition class of the Conservatory first under Yuri Balkashin's guidance, then under Boris Arapov's.

He graduated from the Conservatory as a composer in 1964, submitting the Symphony for String Orchestra and Percussion and the Quintet for Winds as his diploma works.

Falik's independent composer path started with the Second String Quartet (1965) dedicated to Yuri Balkashin's memory.

He outlined the plan, action and atmosphere of a ballet and later developed dance movements in detail for the each phrase of Falik's music.

A similar fate befell the fourth planned ballet "Capriccios" based on F. Goya's works to a libretto by the artist Gavriil Glickman.

Thus, it was within the ballet genre that the composer's concertato style matured, quite clearly exposing the theatrical and playful nature of Falik's creative talent.

A lyrical-philosophical concept of the Concerto is embodied on a new technique level: the five-movement composition consists of open parts following each other without interruption and provides the effect of continuous development of the principal intonation idea.

Melodic material of the Concerto grows out of several simple tunes which are presented in the Introduction and pass evolving and varying through the whole cycle.

The Concerto was dedicated to his friend Victor Lieberman and performed by him in Leningrad under conductor Alexander Dmitriev) with great success.

In 1990-1992 Falik completed the main part of "Liturgical Chants" based on the text of a Russian Orthodox prayer book.

In his Interview with A. Yepishin in 2006 Falik recalled that his creative impulse for writing the choral cycle was provoked by the prayer book published in 1887, which he discovered in 1983 in the belongings of his deceased mother.

American choirmaster Larry Сook, who heard "Liturgical Chants", suggested that Falik write a catholic Mass.

Falik remembered, the Mass for soloists, chorus and chamber orchestra was written surprisingly quickly – in a month and a half.

It should be noted the sacred theme matured over the previous two decades in his instrumental works such as the Third, Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Quartets, "Symphonic Etudes" (1977) etc.

Likewise, movements of the Concerto della Passione (1988) are titled "Lacrimosa", "Dies irae", "Libera me", "Lux aeterna".

However, Falik doesn't seek to recreate the genre, treating prototypes generically as symbols of the spiritual human being.

In the end of the 1980s the American producer Geraldine Freund set out to revive the genre of symphonic musical fairy tale for children, like Prokofiev's "Petya and the Wolf".

[17] Falik accepted and soon, by August of 1989 full score of the musical fairy tale "Polly and Dinosaurs" for two narrators, children choir and symphony orchestra was completed.

In the following year Falik was invited to America to conduct the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the world premiere of his musical Fairy Tale.

For the first time, he picked up the conductor's baton, while a student of the Conservatory, when he had to record music for Lope de Vega's play "A Peasant Woman from Getafe" for Leningrad Film Studio.

As a conductor, Falik participated in the Second and Third World congresses of cellists (1997, Saint Petersburg, and 2000, Baltimore, respectively) under Mstislav Rostropovich's leadership.

After all, the technical design of his works (Falik called it an "engineering plan") was always as original and logically verified, as it was predetermined by the tasks of embodying an artistic concept.

Thus, in the same work an expanded tonality and modal structures coexist with dodecaphony technique elements;[19] melodic themes alternate with timbre and texture complexes-themes and colorful sonority; rigid, elastic and "gestural" rhythm is replaced with a free speech-recitation or chant-monody development of musical time.

Archaic intonations, marked by his own style and placed in the stylistic context of music of the XX-XXI centuries, determine the sound image of the most significant compositions of the central and late works (such as Violin Concerto, String Quartets, Second and Third Symphonies, Elegiac Music, Symphony Etudes, Concerto della Passione, Mess, Liturgical Chant et.)