Sergey Starostin - vocals, gusli, rojok
Sergei Klewenski - clarinet, woodwinds
Taisia Krasnopewtseva - vocals, hurdy-gurdy
Olga Krasnopewtseva - vocals

‘If there was a ‘Nobel Prize for Russian Folklore’ the first person this award should go to would be Sergey Starostin’.

Sergey Starostin is a musician, a tireless explorer, a talented master. He is a brilliant Russian folk and jazz musician, singer and multi-instrumentalist. He’s been collecting and studying Russian folk songs for many years now – going around on his folklore expeditions he has gathered and preserved almost 3000 songs. Thus he is not simply a performer but also a serious explorer of the folklore who sees a number of phenomena from his own unique perspective. As a musician Starostin manages to combine amazingly the traditional approach to studying and performing folklore songs with the modern and sometimes vanguard music trends. He is the author of a number of music projects, and was also nominated for the World Music Awards 2003, bestowed annually by the BBC to the most fascinating world musicians working in the area of ethnic music.

Sergey Nikolaevich Starostin was born in Moscow in 1956. His first encounters with the roots of Russian culture came about thanks to his family. His parents were people of ‘the generation that used to leave the villages looking for new opportunities in the city’ yet he was brought up in a family environment where Russian folklore traditions were well remembered and preserved. Sergey Starostin used to sing from early childhood, he sang in a boy’s choir. In 1981 he graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he studied clarinet.

Sergey Starostin started studying the Russian folklore traditions while he was still a university student. After finishing the first year in University he went on an Ethnologic expedition in the Ryazan area where he heard the singing of an elderly local village woman – she had the amazing ability to not simply sing but rather, as the theoreticians would say, create an astonishing ‘musica.......
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