Biography (read more)
Sergey Rudnev (born 1955 in Tula, Russia) is a Russian guitarist and composer. No Wikipedia article exists for him, but he is documented on specialist guitar-research sites and in academic writing. He entered the Tula Music College in 1971 to study bayan and balalaika, and, lacking a guitar class there, worked out the fundamentals of classical guitar technique largely on his own before taking private lessons with Moscow guitarists V. Slavin and P. Panin. After military service, during which he played in a garrison orchestra, he opened his own guitar class in Tula. A pivotal encounter in Moscow in 1980 with the noted Argentine guitarist María Luisa Anido reshaped his approach to the instrument. Since 1996 he has served as Cultural Programmes director for the Leo Tolstoy State Memorial Museum-Estate at Yasnaya Polyana and as music director of the Children’s State Philharmonic.
Rudnev’s early compositions drew on Western and jazz harmony, but he later turned to Russian traditional music, producing guitar arrangements of folk songs and dances that blend fingerstyle and other modern techniques with a folk sensibility. In 2015 he was named a Russian “National Treasure,” and he is often described in guitar literature as one of the defining figures of contemporary Russian guitar. His arrangement of the folk song “The Old Lime Tree” is representative of this folk-fusion approach.
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