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Anna and Katia Kazyanskaya |
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Anna and Katia Kazyanskaya were born in Yaroslavl into a family of musicians on April 27, 1978. They started learning music as young children, singing in a duet, attending a music school and participating in city concerts. They displayed a great interest in Jewish music and jazz.
In 1995, the vocal duet of Anna and Katia Kazyanskaya won the second prize at Halleluia-95 --the International Youth Festival of Songs about Israel in Moscow -- with the song The Promised Land (music by Y.Kazyansky, lyrics by L.Kopylova).
In 2000, they graduated from the Yaroslavl University with a BA degree in philology and culturology. Since then, Anna and Katia had worked at "Tse Ulmad" – the Jewish Cultural Center – as coordinators of the musical-literary project The Yiddish Culture. There, they worked on programs related to Jewish culture - music and literature. Anna and Katia toured several cities in Russia and other former Soviet republics with their concert-lecture The Jewish Life in Songs. Since October 2001, they had edited Kehila -- the newspaper of the Yaroslavl Jewish Community.
The vocal duet of Anna and Katia Kazyanskaya participated in The Festival of the Modern Jewish Song (Moscow, 1999), The Pliner Festival of the Jewish Culture (Kazan, 2002), the festivals of the Klezmer music Klezfest (St.Petersburg, 2000, 2003). They are laureates of the regional festival-contest The Music Spring for Children (1999) as well as other regional contests and festivals.
The duet performed in many Russian cities – in Yaroslavl (1998-2004), Moscow, Ul’yanovsk (2002), Vologda (2000), Kostroma (2000), Rybinsk (2000-2004) and others, as well as in Kassel, Germany (2001, 2005).
In July 2002, Anna and Katia participated in the international seminar Yiddish un Yiddishkeit in Warsaw, Poland, where they not only improved their command of Yiddish, but also performed their concert program Abisl Glick. The song Afn Pripechek, performed by the vocal duet, was broadcast by a major Polish national TV Network.
In August 2003, Anna and Katia participated in the 12th International Nahum Goldman Fellowship in Glamsta, Sweden.
In July 2003, Anna, Katia, and Yakov Kazyansky released the CD of Jewish songs Abisl Glick (A Little Bit of Happiness).
The repertoire of the duet consists of dozens of songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, English, German, French and Spanish, as well as jazz and retro compositions.
In 2005, Anna Kazyanskaya married Ilya Korzhenevich. Currently, she lives in Chicago, USA, working toward her MBA at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also works as an Assistant Director at Chess Scholars. In 2009, Katia Kazyanskaya married Alexander Elbert. Currently she lives in Columbus, Ohio, USA and works as a Helpdesk Specialist at American Red Cross.