Asya Fateyeva
Asya Fateyeva was born in Kerch on the Crimean peninsula in 1990. She remembers well how she could taste the salty air on her tongue on her way to music school there. Her father, a professional footballer, and mother supported her love of music from an early age. Fateyeva was six when she began taking piano lessons. “My first piano teacher, Valentina Nikishina, sowed the seeds of my love of the arts and taught me the intensity and depth of the Russian school,” Asya Fateyeva recalls. Making music “with a Russian soul” is what still characterises this successful saxophonist, even though the French school now pervades her playing.
Asya Fateyeva discovered the saxophone at the age of ten. It was actually her father who wanted to take up the instrument, but the warm sound of the saxophone soon captivated her. “I fell in love as soon as I heard the first note and was lucky to find an excellent teacher so quickly.” It was in Simferopol that Lilija Russanova taught her the French school of saxophone playing. After only six months Asya Fateyeva was ready to play in an orchestra.