In 1980 Vladimir Tarnopolsky completed his postgraduate studies at the Moscow Conservatoire and the same year his cello concerto degree work was included in Gennady Rozhdestvensky’s subscription concert series From the History of Soviet Music. 
Since then the composer’s music has been performed both in Russia and abroad. His chamber and orchestral works have been performed by music ensembles under Mstislav Rostropovich, Valery Gergiev, Alexander Lazarev, Ingo Metzmacher, Reinbert de Leeuw and Vladimir Jurowski. Tarnopolsky’s first stage work was the parody opera The Three Graces (1987), followed by the farce opera Oh, These Russians (1993) and the composer’s major operatic opus Wenn die Zeit über die Ufer tritt after motifs from plays by Chekhov (1999). In 2003 the Barbican Hall in London hosted the premiere of A True Story about Cinderella, whilst in 2006 at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn came the multimedia opera Beyond the Shadow. In Russia both opers were staged in 2015 A True Story about Cinderella at the Mariinsky Theatre (directed by Arkady Gevondov) and Beyond the Shadow at the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Theatre in Moscow (directed by Robert Veksler). 
In 1989 Vladimir Tarnopolsky was one of the creators of the Association of Contemporary Music, while four years later he founded the Studio of New Music ensemble and the Centree of Contemporary Music at the Moscow Conservatoire. The annual contemporary music festival Moscow Forum was also established by the composer. 
For more than twenty years Vladimir Tarnopolsky has taught composition at the Moscow Conservatoire are given lectures and master-classes in the USA and throughout Europe. The composer’s prizes include the Rostrum award (2001), the Dmitry Shostakovich Prize and the Paul Hindemith Prize (1991).