The House of the Actor is relaunching: from the satire theater to a music laboratory

The return of the band

The project was realized thanks to the grant support of the “House of Culture” project of the company “Logika Moloka”; 3 million rubles were allocated for the realization of the initiative. As recalls the director of the Marcel Salimzhanov House of the Actor, Lilia Garaeva, when she came in February 2026 to her new place of work, here there was essentially one microphone. The founder of the Yummy Music label, Ilyas Gafarov, proposed that she submit an application for a grant, thanks to which now one can hold concerts, performances and evenings here without additional expenses.

— I want to give more opportunities to young artists, Garaeva said. — Now we are thinking over the formats, but here there will be concerts, and performances, and laboratories, and much else.

The event is called a “relaunch”: since 1968, when the house under the Union of Theater Workers moved to a new building from the “Grand Hotel” on Kavi Nadzhmi, life has been boiling here. For example, the satire theater worked here, which was headed by Rabit Batulla. There is a peculiar connection with the past in the beloved Yummy Music Band's Ilkham Shakirov: he gave concerts here, of which even footage of amateur video filming has been preserved — with the young poets Renat Kharis and Razil Valeev at the post-concert feast.

At the same time Yummy Music Band and the Yummy Music label have their own history with the House of the Actor: here on the third floor their first base-studio appeared, when the head of the Union of Theater Workers of Tatarstan, Farid Bikchantaev, allocated them the place of the former film projection room. News on the city hall portal has been preserved about this: “A recording studio is opening in the Kazan House of the Actor.” At the presentation then the groups Ittifaq, Kumukh, Funktion Unlimited, Albert Ismail, Guzel Minakova and Mubai performed. Yummy Music Band after this survived a reincarnation in order to return in recent years with the tribute to Ilkham Shakirov, which sounded in Gorky Park, the Tatar Philharmonic, the Kazan Kremlin, and also came out in the form of a record.

Fedorov criticizes

The band called its appearance in 2026 an “open rehearsal”; almost a full hall gathered for it. Indeed, it was a real rehearsal: the head of the group, Yuri Fedorov, every now and then stopped the musicians and demanded that they play now softer, now more drawn out, now more clearly, now more sharply, and the main thing — sharper, sharper! The director and bass guitarist Ilnar Fatikhov especially got it, who later joked: “In fact, we rehearsed all this with Yura for a long time.”

With Ilgiz Shaikhraziev the band went through the song “Kerfekläreñ sineñ nigä kara” (“Why are your eyelashes black”), pointing out how the guitar groove from Azat Gilmutdinov appeared, noting the accents in the work of the drummer Marat Mukhamedzyanov, separately playing the keyboard vignettes.

Shaikhraziev recalled that he had initially written his own arrangement for this folk song, and the endless movement of the groove appeared later.

Elmira Kalimullina and Aida Bagdasaryan performed “The Adriatic Sea” ("Ädrän diñgez”). During the rehearsals Kalimullina asked Fedorov to lower the key by a tone, from E to D, which was not easy for the head — after all, he had introduced into the arrangement a fragment of Rimsky-Korsakov's “Scheherazade," which in the original gave its own coloring of the sound.

— I performed this song back in Nizhnekamsk on my mother's suggestion, Kalimullina recalled. — My voice had already begun to mutate, so imagine how a little girl sang it in a low voice. This composition is special for me.

Kalimullina also joked that Fedorov would not analyze the arrangement of the song in detail: “Otherwise the rehearsal will go on into the night. Although I am not at all against it!”

The rehearsal was completed by a composition that had sounded only at concerts — it is “Gölmäryam” in the version of Ilgiz Mukhutdinov, who, on the contrary, asked to raise the key in order to maximally reveal the possibilities of his tenor. Here the feature of the song became the insinuating riffs performed by the whole collective. Not the whole lineup of YMB appeared at the rehearsal — of the strings there were only violin and cello; trombone and saxophone also sounded on the stage. At the request of the spectators the string players even played a fragment on their own.

— We could have played this song last summer in Gorky Park, but it was not ready, and we are not used to giving the public a subproduct, said Mukhutdinov. — But then, when we began to think over the composition not as a duo but as the whole group, it came together very quickly.

Now — not only a rethinking of hits

In the finale it was announced that the band is launching an open call for young authors-performers. It begins on October 22 and ends in a month. Only artists and projects that write their own material can participate; it will need to be provided in the form of audio or video. As a result five finalists will be selected, who will rehearse in the House of the Actor with the band up to three of their songs from January to May 2027, and then present the result at one of the Kazan festivals, which they will try to record in digital form.

For YMB this is the second experience of big work with contemporary material. This autumn the musicians worked with Marat Yarullin, who performed with them at the Tinchurin Theater with a whole concert, stepping away from the usual variety persona. However here the challenge is more serious, since, most likely, Fedorov and company will have to work with completely new material.

— I have been thinking about this more and more lately, says Fedorov, — because as a producer I have started a different career. I would like to work with author's music also within the framework of the band. Marat's concert showed that the spectator begins to be charged by this sound, you understand? When we started in 2014, there was a strong division between Tatar pop and us; we were perceived almost as an underground. Now everything has changed; the skill, the understanding of music and the producing skills have grown. I have almost 50% given up sound recording, I have begun to do fewer arrangements and concentrated more on producing work. I want to repeat today's format too, because people asked: can we be present at the creation?