Bagjan Oktyabr

Kazygurt to Almaty, by way of a boarding school

Bagjan Oktyabr comes from the Kazygurt district in southern Kazakhstan. His father is a musician and composer, and the family moved to Almaty in 2002, when Oktyabr was still small. At six he was placed in the republican specialised music boarding school for gifted children named after Zhubanov — by his own account, he did not know what a cello was when he was taken there. He has now been playing the instrument for nineteen years.

The training was conventional and thorough. He went on to the Kazakh National University of Arts in the capital, then still called Nur-Sultan, and has since defended a dissertation in cello performance. Nothing in that path predicts what followed; the academic route in Kazakhstan generally ends in an orchestra pit or a teaching post, not a 1,000-capacity hall in Battersea.

The videos that changed the job description

The shift happened while he was studying in the capital, where he began recording video covers. He had been watching cellists abroad who filmed themselves outdoors, and decided the Kazakh landscape was at least as good a backdrop as anything they had. He moved back to Almaty specifically to shoot in it.

The numbers moved fast. His Instagram account, @clvdeex, went from around 6,000 followers to roughly 120,000 inside a year, largely on the back of one cover that travelled. By the time he described this in an interview with the Almaty outlet WEproject, he had played about eleven concerts across Kazakh cities — a small live footprint attached to a large online one.

He has kept the filming going rather than treating it as a launch tactic he outgrew. In February 2026 he recorded on a mountain road with snow-covered peaks behind him. On 7 April 2026 Kazakh media reported a new film shot on the Aktolagai plateau in Aktobe region, among the white chalk escarpments there, performing Akhmet Zhubanov's "Karlygash" in his own arrangement. His stated aim for that piece was to put Kazakh classical repertoire into a contemporary frame and get it in front of people who would not otherwise seek it out.

What Soul Therapy actually contains

Soul Therapy is the name of both the concert programme and the wider project. Promoters describe it as original music written for cello and performed live, built at the join between several genres. In practice the set is a mix: pieces of the world classical repertoire, Kazakh folk motifs, film scores, contemporary instrumental writing, and — the part that has done the most for him commercially — themes from Turkish television dramas, all in his own arrangements. The dombra, the two-stringed Kazakh lute, is worked into some of those arrangements alongside the cello.

The Turkish strand is substantial enough to have become its own release. His "Best of Turkish" material draws on themes by the composer Toygar Işıklı, covering series including Kara Sevda, Aşk-ı Memnu, Çukur and Ezel, and he has issued a full live-band version of that programme on his YouTube channel. On streaming services the catalogue is thinner than the touring schedule suggests: Apple Music lists a 2025 EP, "Soul of nature", alongside the singles.

That imbalance is worth naming. The records are not the centre of gravity here. The video work and the live programme are, and the recorded catalogue trails behind both.

Where he is right now

The current run is billed as the Soul Therapy World Tour 2026, with a revised repertoire and, in the promoters' phrase, an expanded geography. It is his first serious sustained push outside Central Asia.

The Kazakh leg came first: a spring Soul Therapy programme with orchestra at the Palace of the Republic in Almaty on 12 March 2026, with the concert films projected as part of the staging. Turkey followed in June, described by the organisers as his first major concert tour there — 17 June 2026 at the İBB Prof. Dr. Adem Baştürk Kültür Merkezi in Istanbul, doors at 19:00 for a 20:00 start, then 19 June at the Türkan Şoray Kültür Merkezi in Antalya, doors 20:00 for 21:00, both with chamber orchestra. Before either of those, he had played the Zabeel Theatre in Dubai on 25 May 2025, with tickets from 145 dirhams.

Autumn 2026 is the European stretch. He played the Clapham Grand in London on 17 September. Berlin follows on 24 September at the Urania's Humboldtsaal, tickets from €58; Paris at Salle Gaveau on 26 September; Hamburg's Friedrich-Ebert-Halle on 30 September; Haus Leipzig on 2 October; Baku's Heydar Aliyev Palace on 10 October. Prague's Theatre Hybernia is also on the routing, and Apple Music's event listing adds Amsterdam and Stockholm plus Turkish stops in Muğla, Pamukkale, İzmir, Odunpazarı, Antalya and Alanya. Advertised dates extend as far as 5 February 2027.

The evidence, and its limits

Anyone assessing this act honestly has to acknowledge how little independent criticism exists. The recurring claims — sold-out halls in many countries, an audience running to several hundred thousand — come from ticketing pages and promoter copy, not from reviewers who bought a seat. Kazakh coverage is largely news-of-the-day reporting on each new landscape film rather than concert criticism, and the European dates are too fresh to have generated much in print.

What can be checked is the shape of the operation, and it is not trivial. The venues are real and mid-sized to large: Salle Gaveau, the Urania, the Palace of the Republic, the Heydar Aliyev Palace. The Turkish dates carried an orchestra, not a backing track. The tour is being sold by established agencies across at least seven countries. That is a long way past the point where a musician is simply monetising a viral clip, even if the critical record has not caught up with the itinerary.

The pitch, plainly stated

The programme is sold on emotional effect rather than repertoire prestige — the promotional line is that audiences will feel something and leave lighter, which is roughly what the project's title promises. That framing will put off listeners who want a recital and attract the much larger group who found him through a phone screen and want to hear the same thing in a room.

The more interesting question is the Zhubanov strand. Taking Kazakh classical writing out to European halls inside a programme that also contains Turkish soap themes is an unusual piece of smuggling, and it is the part of the project most likely to matter in ten years.