Dr Svetlana Zvereva
Dr Svetlana Zvereva is a musicologist, editor, choral conductor, lecturer, and language coach. She is well-known internationally as a specialist in Russian music, both through her publications and through many years of participating in international conferences, seminars, and lectures, and also as an organiser of music festivals and exhibitions. She has participated over the years in several Russian and international projects related to the editing, popularising, and performing of Russian music, as well as the strengthening of the Russian cultural heritage.
Svetlana has contributed widely to such academic projects as The History of Russian Music in 10 volumes (1983–2011) and The History of Russian Art (22 volumes, 2007–; project ongoing). She is also the initiator, as well as one of the writers and editors, of the multi-volume series Russian Sacred Music in Documents and Materials published in Moscow in 1998. Moreover, she is the author of the monograph Alexander Kastalsky: His Life and Music (Aldershot, Ashgate Publishing, 2003). She contributed as a scientific editor to the compendium The Russian Abroad: Music and Orthodoxy (Moscow, 2013). She is the author of some 150 academic articles and has contributed to the Orthodox Encyclopaedia, Die neue Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart and The New Grove Dictionary. Her projects were supported by many British and international scholarships and grants, including the RCS’s Athenaeum Award.
She graduated from the Faculty of Theory and Composition of the Leningrad Conservatoire, was awarded a diploma with distinction, and completed her postgraduate dissertation at the State Institute for Art Studies in Moscow, where she has worked since 1987. In 1997 she was promoted to Senior Research Fellow. Under the supervision of Professor Yuri Keldysh, she defended her doctoral thesis in 1988 on the topic of Russian Choirs and Composers from the end of the 15th to the middle of the 17th centuries.
Her research interests are the History of Russian music (late medieval period; the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the Soviet period; diaspora studies; Soviet territories under Nazi occupation during the Second World War), archival and source materials, textual criticism and editorial aspects of research into Russian music. In addition, Dr Zvereva has a great interest in teaching, and specifically in general musical development in children and adults, the teaching of singing in Russian and Church Slavonic to singers with no knowledge of Russian and teaching and coaching of the Russian Language.
From 2009 to 2020 Svetlana directed the Russkaya Cappella choir in Glasgow and has been a member of the teaching staff at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland since 2010.