Real World music in new BBC2 Series

In the early seventies Dmitri Pokrovsky was a student of conducting at Moscow's Gnessin Institute. Frustrated with the current musical scene, he felt the need to discover something fresh and different - "an alternative musical language, something that would break through all the old patterns and rules."

The individual members of the Terem Quartet came together as students at the Lenningrad Conservatoire in 1986. In just a few years this brilliant folk ensemble have won many coveted awards both in the Soviet Union and internationally and they have gained an outstanding reputation worldwide.

The singer/songwriter Mamer was raised in Xinjiang, one of ten children for whom singing and playing the two-string dombra lute was as much a part of life as sunrise. Out here - in this land of Turkic tongues and ethnic minorities - traditional music flows from yurts and across the sparsely inhabited steppes. And Mamer's voice, a low, resonant, magical thing, still joins it.

Ashkhabad is the capital of Turkmenistan and its cultural heart. The city's finest musicians have come together and called themselves Ashkhabad, a word which derives from the Persian language and means 'city of love.
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Armed with a healthy respect for tradition and a penchant for sonic experimentation, the pint-sized diva from 21st Century Uzbekistan is doing things her way. Her first album 'Yol Bolsin' is meeting place between old and new and her new album, Sen, takes the Silk Road on a stunning detour.