Sergei Budkeyev was born in Biysk in 1952. His parents were a painter and a theater actress. The musician recalls that his childhood “was spent behind the stage of a theater and in an art studio.” His parents decided, “There is already a painter and an actress in our family, but we don’t have a musician. Let our child be a musician.”
Sergei Budkeyev’s journey in music began when he started taking private lessons from Berthold Kohn. After graduating from Glazunov Music School No. 1, Sergei Budkeyev entered the piano department of Barnaul Music College. He received his higher education in Novosibirsk and Nizhny Novgorod conservatories where he studied the piano and organ (later he also mastered the harpsichord). After that, he completed an assistantship and postgraduate studies at the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory, specializing in organ and musical art.
Initially, Sergei Budkeyev had no real prospects of becoming an organist in Barnaul even though he fell in love with the instrument at a very early age. In 1956, the four-year-old Sergei was greatly impressed by the radio broadcast of Alexander Goedicke’s concert at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.
Eventually, Sergei Budkeyev became the only musician in Siberia to study under the outstanding organist Leonid Roizman. Budkeyev’s manner of performance was greatly inspired by both Roizman and Goedicke.
In the 1980s, the Barnaul administration decided to purchase an organ, and Budkeyev was sent on an assignment to Moscow. In addition to his training as a musician, he was asked to study the art of organ building. This knowledge soon came in handy when Budkeyev discussed installing the organ with Zdeněk Světlík, a Rieger-Kloss engineer from Czechoslovakia. Later, Sergei Budkeyev also visited Czechoslovakia where he observed the entire process of organ building — from preparing the lead and tin alloy to making the pipes.
The musician recalls that in 1984, together with representatives of the regional executive committee Alexander Nevsky and Anna Dobrikova, they “decided that it was important to educate the public”. They came up with the idea to create a series of organ concerts with season tickets for the region’s school and university students.
The 18 concerts covered the period from the Middle Ages to the modern world. The repertoire of the lecture concerts included everything, from 17th-century keyboard music (which Budkeyev performed in Barnaul for the first time) to contemporary avant-garde music.
Sergei Budkeyev has become famous not only as a performer
but also as a teacher, enlightener, and public figure. He has written over 200
works on culture, organ performance, and education, published both in Russia
and abroad.
