The seven-string guitar played a vital role in music of the Russian Empire with many works composed for guitar solo and duet. Combinations of guitar with other instruments are quite rare, and the best music for guitar and piano comes from the circles of Vladimir Morkov (1801–1864). Miller and Timofeyev will perform Morkov’s original works and transcriptions, using the NMM's fortepiano by Anton Martin Thÿm, ca. 1815, and an original guitar by Mikhail Eroshkin, ca. 1900, from Timofeyev's personal collection.

Elizaveta Miller is a true and inspired multi-instrumentalist, who plays most of the keyboard instruments: harpsichord, fortepiano and piano but also clavichord and organ. Her repertoire covers five centuries of music, from late Renaissance to contemporary. In 2013, she became the first prize winner of the Bruges Musica Antiqua Competition. She has performed throughout Europe and Russia, taking part in the Bruges MA Festival, Beethovenfest Bonn, Bozar Music, Dubrovnik Music Festival and The Homecoming Music Festival. As a continuo player, she has collaborated with numerous conductors, including Václav Luks, Reinhard Goebel, Maxim Emelyanychev, Robert Hollingsworth, Christian Curnyn, and others.

Miller studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at Yale School of Music. She held a teaching position at the Moscow State Conservatory in historical instruments departement for 9 years but resigned and left the country in March 2022, after the beginning of the full-scale Russian aggression on Ukraine. In May 2022, she received an offer from the McGill University in Montreal, where she is now an Assistant Professor of harpsichord.

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Oleg Timofeyev is a musicologist, guitarist, composer, documentary film director, and the world authority on the Russian seven-string guitar tradition. Dr. Timofeyev holds an M.A. in Early Music Performance from the University of Southern California and a Ph.D. from Duke University. The recipient of two IREX Fellowships, two Fulbright Research and Teaching Fellowships, he has won the coveted Noah Greenberg Award for his CDs “Music of Russian Princesses at the Court of Catherine the Great.” In addition, he has recorded more than twenty CD solo and ensemble recordings featuring the music for the Russian seven-string guitar, to critical acclaim worldwide. Dr. Oleg Timofeyev has taught at universities and conservatoires in the US, Russia, and Ukraine. In addition to a book on Russian-Romani guitar playing (Centerstream, 2018) and a critical edition of collected works by Matvei Pavlov-Azancheev (with Stefan Wester, DGA Editions, 2020), Timofeyev recently published the historically first monograph on the seven–string guitar in Russia (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2023).

This program is funded by the Clayton & Odessa Lang Ofstad Foundation, Bank of America N. A., Co-Trustee.