One of my first purely aesthetic auditory experiences happened in a tiny country garden somewhere in Moscow region, when my mother suddenly became aware that I was totally absorbed by the single small bird’s singing.

Remember how, while in an infant school, I used to torture our music teacher with my spontaneously and chaotically excogitated vocalizations for which every time she desperately tried to find an accompaniment and which I could never repeat twice in the same way…Then quite an ordinary (for a nowaday’s classical musician) course of study: seven years in a music school as a piano student, choir class, discovery of the voice and a passionate dream of the stage. Two years in the famous Merzlyakovka and four years in the Gnessin College of Music in Moscow, classified as a mezzo-soprano; master program at the MUK University in Vienna; post-graduate opera studio in Belgium; Rossini Opera Festival in Italy. During those years of academic studies I’ve been fortunate to learn from and work with some of the most prominent, most outstanding personalities in the field of Music, Art and Culture. Having deeply assimilated and synthesised various kinds of artistic experiences gradually woken up in me a desire not just to interpret, but to create. Impressions inspire expression Diana Volkova Solo Project was born simply as me performing Shakespeare’s sonnets, singing and accompanying myself with a classical guitar. Together with the works by Shakespeare, I performed several poetic pieces of Donne, Blake, Wordsworth, Giordano Bruno and of a contemporary poet Alexander Chirozidi. The next step was to start writing my own textes and to create the songs which stylistically and harmonically are closer to the modern “ear” and taste and which qualify me today as a singer-songwriter. Recently, I tried myself also as a performer of the songs written for me by other authors, e.g. Stratfolk, being always at freedom to develop and to interpret all the compositions according to my own artistic vision, or, better, hearing.