LONDON: Rossotrudnichestvo - Russia in the UK

Monday 6th April, 2020

7:00pm

Event information

In April 2020 the world’s leading expert on the Russian seven-string guitar Oleg Timofeyev will be touring the UK for the first time. For his London concert, he will present a program of 19th and 20th century instrumental music and accompany Brighton’s own Russian singer Polina Shepherd a few songs in Russian and Yiddish.

Both in Russia and in the West, very few people are aware of the magnitude and quality of the repertoire for the Russian seven-string guitar, the instrument from the times of Pushkin, Tolstoy, Chechov and Dostoevsky. This tradition was pretty much abandoned in Russia and elsewhere, when Mr. Timofeyev rolled up his sleeves, wrote a PhD on the subject, recorded more than 30 CDs, and started an annual Russian Guitar Festival in Iowa, USA. If there is anything you wanted to know about the Russian seven-string guitar (or semistrunka, as it often affectionately addressed), here is an opportunity not to be missed!

As much as the musical world is impressed by the number and quality of Oleg’s recordings, his live presentation offers the listener a special charm of intimate, engaging live performance. For pretty much every piece played on an original instrument by Johann Scherzer (ca. 1860), Timofeyev has an introduction to put it into historical and cultural context. For example, he will share with you a shockingly light-wing variations on the Russian anthem “God Save the Czar,” and explain the roots of the disproportional popularity of Oginski’s Polonaise in Russian and Soviet culture. He will play a selection of tunes from his project “Guitar in the Gulag,” dedicated to the life and work of Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev (1888-1963), who spent 10 years in a Stalin’s concentration camp where against all odds he managed to continue writing original music for the seven-string guitar, which enabled his survival amidst the atrocities of the Stalin's regime.

Timofeyev’s collaboration with Polina started US in 2018, when they performed a selection of Yiddish songs by Mark Warshawsky. A native of Ukraine, Warshawsky was an early-20th century songwriter, who supposedly performed his songs to his own guitar accompaniment. In the concert on April 8 the audience will have a chance to hear what it sounded like, plus several celebrated art songs in Russian.

Ticket price £10 online, £15 on the door
Doors open 19.00, concert starts 19.15

37 Kensington High Street
Kensington
London
W8 5ED

gbr.rs.gov.ru/en/pages/351