Guest Artist

Tamara Volskaya Domra virtuoso

The Shevchenko Musical Ensemble has had many outstanding guest artists appear on their programs. Perhaps the most memorable and inspiring, for the musicians and audience alike, have been the appearances of domra virtuoso Tamara Volskaya with the Toronto Mandolin Orchestra.

Tamara was first invited to Canada by the Shevchenko Guild in 1992 to perform with the TMO at Columbus Centre. In 1996 the Guild brought Tamara all the way from Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains to appear with the orchestra in Glenn Gould Studio.

So successful and popular was this performance that Tamara, by that time resident in New York, was invited back in 1999 to appear once again with the Toronto Mandolin Orchestra. For this appearance Alexander Veprinsky, Artistic Director of the Shevchenko Musical Ensemble and conductor of the orchestra, made history by arranging George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue for solo domra and mandolin orchestra. Since that time Tamara has appeared a number of times with the orchestra and Ensemble as a whole performing Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saens, Shostakovich’s Burlesque (Finale from the Violin Concerto Nº 1, Scheherazade Suite Excerpts by Rimsky-Korsakov and more. The TMO is looking forward to Tamara appearing with them again on November 28, 2010 in the Richmond Hill Centre for the Arts.

Tamara Volskaya began her music studies on the domra at the Kyiv Music College in Ukraine where she revealed an exceptional talent at an early age. As a teenager not yet graduated from the College, but already a master of the instrument, Tamara was admitted to the P. Tchaikovsky State Conservatory in Kyiv.

After graduation Tamara accepted a position at the Mussorgsky Urals State Conservatory in Ekaterinburg, Russia (then known as Sverdlovsk). In addition to organizing and heading the Folk Instrument Faculty at the Music School for Gifted Students in Ekaterinburg, she conducted master classes with these exceptional students, preparing them for competitions and solo performances. She also continued to master an ever-widening solo repertoire of her own. In Ekaterinburg Tamara attained a professorship and was awarded the honour Merited Artist of Russia.

Tamara appeared on radio and television, produced two solo albums and appeared as guest artist with the famous Osipov Folk Instrument Orchestra of Moscow.

At the Urals Conservatory she met and married Anatoliy Trofimov, also a professor of folk instruments at the Urals State Conservatory and they became a popular musical duo traveling and performing in Russian and other republics of the Soviet Union.

Tamara and Anatoliy have performed in Australia, at the International Music Festival in Kobe, Japan as well as in Tokyo; the International Mandolin Festival in Logrono, Spain, the Haapavesi Folk Festival in Finland and in Canada.

Tamara and Anatoliy perform regularly throughout the USA as a bayan-domra duo and as members of the Russian Carnival Ensemble, a lively group of five exceptional performers, which they founded a number of years ago.