Шилклопер - Альперин - Старостин "The Moscow Art Trio"

Mikhail Alperin – piano, claviolo, melodica, vocals

Arkady Shilkloper – French horn, Fluegelhorn, vocals

Sergey Starostin – clarinet, brass-wind instruments, vocals

The Moscow Art Trio is one of the most exciting new jazz formations. The boundaries between jazz, folk and classical music have become irrelevant or as the critic, Mike Zwerin, wrote in the International Herald Tribune: “Rarely have the frontiers between epochs, Eastern and Western folk music, and jazz and classical music been so gracefully negotiated as by the Moscow Art Trio.’ ‘The personalities of the trio’s members are more important than the instruments they play.”

Piano player Mikhail Alperinis the composer and guiding force of the trio. He has been living in Oslo since 1993 and has become a central figure when it comes to new improvised music of the far north. Horn player Arkady Shilkloper was a member of the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra and has worked with the Bolshoi Theater orchestra. His unique ability to combine the different music languages makes him famous all over the world. Folksinger Sergey Starostin always showed great interest for folk tales and folk music, even while studying classical music. Whenever he travelled around the former Soviet Union, he would collect stories, songs and traditional instruments. In the Moscow Art Trio he is playing folk reeds and clarinet. He is also writing most of the lyrics.

The first performance of the trio has been on the 5th of June 1990 in Moscow. Since then Moscow Art Trio has been performing all over the world. They have produced many CD’s and cooperated with artists like Bulgarian Voices Angelite Huun-Huur-Tu from Tuva.

The Moscow Art Trio’s spectrum is exceedingly wide– it travels musically to the border of China, paints with Impressionist colors, plays a tricky Russian wedding dance. The music of the ensemble is enriched not with exotic trinkets tacked on as decoration, but with delicate nuances, embedded homogeneously in the group sound. The result is a new form of jazz– poetic jazz. In the midst of Moldavian, Georgian and Russian themes the ‘figures of speech’ often used are the: repetitions, wild outbreaks, and moments of stillness.

Performance

Phil Johnson, of The Independent Magazine, referred to the performance of the Moscow Art Trio as: “Unlike other European groups who aim at a home-made, “poor theatre” type of music the Moscow Art Trio don’t have to try to sound Post-Modern – they just are, and in a way that makes what they play, and the context of performance which underpins it, look and sound both utterly contemporary and timeless. Tarkovsky, no; Paradjanov (the Armenian director of The Color of Pomegranates), yes. Once word gets out, they will be the band to book for every festival going.” this way, it is not accidental that the discography of the Moscow Art Trio includes so many live recordings.