Sergey Oskolkov is a Russian composer, actor, pianist, music teacher, and professor. He was born in Stalinо in the USSR. He comes from a musical family: his mother taught piano at a music school, his father was a cellist and music critic, and his grandfather was a composer who had studied at the Kyiv Conservatory with Reinhold Glière. It was his grandfather who first seated the four-year-old Oskolkov at the piano, and a teacher from the music college, Galina Sladkovskaya, helped dispel his doubts and strongly influenced his future path.
After graduating from the Donetsk Music College, he entered the piano faculty of the Leningrad State Conservatory. He completed his studies there as a pianist in the class of Professor P. A. Serebryakov in 1977, and later as a composer under Professors V. L. Nagovitsin and Yu. A. Falik in 1981.
Oskolkov is the author of about one hundred works in a wide range of genres. His output includes three operas, three musicals, three cantatas, two concertos for piano and symphony orchestra, two string quartets, six piano sonatas, many vocal cycles on poems by Russian poets, works for folk instruments, and music for theater and cinema.
Since 1977 he has maintained an active concert career as a piano soloist, ensemble player, and accompanist. He has appeared as a regular participant in major international festivals such as Petersburg Musical Spring, Moscow Autumn, Sound Ways, From the Avant-Garde to the Present Day, and Music of the 20th-21st Centuries.
He became a member of the Union of Soviet Composers in 1988, joined the board of the St. Petersburg Composers' Union in 1994, and became a member of the St. Petersburg Union of Concert Figures in 2003. His teaching work has included instruction in composition at the V. A. Gavrilin Children's School of Arts and piano at the music faculty of the Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University. He later became head of the Department of Sound Engineering at the St. Petersburg University of the Humanities and Social Sciences and served there as a professor. His pedagogical work was recognized with the badge Honorary Worker of Higher Professional Education of the Russian Federation.
Oskolkov also founded the Arts Support Foundation Sergey Oskolkov and His Friends, which organizes concerts, exhibitions, and poetry readings and supports young talents and elderly cultural figures. In 1997 he established the annual International Arts Festival Sergey Oskolkov and His Friends, devoted to music, painting, poetry, theater, and cinema. Over the years the festival has brought together artists from Germany, France, Switzerland, Finland, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Japan, and many Russian composers and performers, while giving particular attention to contemporary composers from St. Petersburg and other regions of Russia.
His work in film has included composing for such films as Call the Dog Handler with a Dog, She Left, Over the Lake, Spring, The Birth of Music, Time, Back!, and Last Love. He also appeared on screen in cameo roles in The Birth of Music and Time, Back! In 2019 he was awarded the title of Honorary Citizen of Peterhof, and his film music received a number of festival distinctions, including recognition for the soundtrack to Last Love.