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By Olga Fyodorova
On June 25, 2000 Alexander Skulsky woke up early and, still in bed, pictured
the hard day waiting ahead…
“Well, I guess the plane from Philadelphia must have already landed and
the members of the boy choir are being ferried to the hotel... The boys
will have breakfast and the rehearsal is scheduled for eleven o’clock.
I hope the city choir and my orchestra will live up to the occasion… We’ve
got to go over the Mass from beginning to end and then we’ll brush up the
more catchy parts… It will take us about three hours. Then we’ll have a
bit of rest and have dinner. Showtime is slated for six p.m.… Uh, a pretty
tight schedule indeed, but there’s nothing we can do about it, really…
Well, what’s the time by the way? Okay, I guess it’s time to get
up…”
“Alexander! I’m glad you’re up! In the thirty years we’ve been together
you must have already realized what a hectic wife you really have… That’s
why I got up so early today and started calling the airport. They
just put my call through. Do you know what they said?! The flight is delayed,
that’s what! They took off just a few minutes ago and are expected to arrive
here at five in the evening! Can you believe that?! What are we going to
do, push the whole thing back to a later date?”
“Oh! There is nowhere we can push it back! Today’s the festival’s closing
day and the whole idea was to wrap up this year’s event with a joint performance
of the Mass 2000 written expressly for the festival!”
“It’s going to be five in the evening when they touch down, but they need
time to walk downstairs, get inside the bus and travel all across the town
to get there... And when are they going to rehearse I wonder?”
“We’ll have maximum fifteen minutes to warm up… Let me see the places we
have to go over. It’s not that bad, really, calm down, will you?
We already rehearsed it on TV and everything went nice and easy. We’ll
explain the whole situation to the people and start an hour or so later.
I’m sure God will help us and everything will be all right. Don’t you worry,
darling…”
It all happened just like Alexander Skulsky said it would. The American
choristers arrived just minutes before the beginning. The local musicians
were all set and it took Skulsky a mere fifteen minutes to appreciate the
clockwork precision the combined outfit performed with…
Alexander Skulsky was born in Nizhny Novgorod, then Gorky, in 1942, at
the very height of the war. Even though the Germans never reached the city
perched on the banks of the Volga River, many locals, just as Alexander’s
father, perished on the battlefront. His mother, exhausted by difficult
childbirth and emaciated by subsequent privations, died when Alexander
was only three years old leaving the boy to the care of his grandmother...
As you might have already guessed, Alexander had a bumpy childhood experiencing
hunger, cold and deprivation early on. Happily, his musical talent
was quickly appreciated and he was admitted to the local boys choir which
was a sort of a boarding school where the choristers sang, studied music
and lived, dressed, fed and cared for by the state. Those were happy years
for the little Alexander…
From there Alexander Skulsky moved on to enter the local conservatory,
tried his hand in conducting and studied with leading musicians. In 1969
he was appointed second conductor of the city’s philharmonic orchestra.
Back then the orchestra was conducted by Israel Gusman, a dazzling musician
who was of great help to Alexander, a greenhorn just fresh from the conservatory.
Immediately appreciating the young man’s musicality and workaholic attitude,
maestro Gusman encouraged Alexander’s burning desire to play modern music…
During the 1960s and 70s Nizhny Novgorod was an experimenter’s paradise
playing host to the first festivals of modern music ever held in the Soviet
Union. Alexander Skulsky happily joined in and before long he was
already the main driving force behind those high-profile events looking
for unknown scores and encouraging seasoned composers to write new symphonies.
The young conductor steered his orchestra through more than 200 musical
premieres many of which were real breakthroughs…
More then three decades and one and a half thousand programs later, including
all symphonies by Beethoven, Schumann, Mahler, Bruckner, Tchaikovsky and
Rakhmaninoff, Alexander Skulsky and his Nizhny Novgorod philharmonic orchestra
are now touted as one of Russia’s very best…
Alexander Skulsky has extensively performed in France, Austria, Belgium,
the United States and the Baltic republics participating in seven Modern
Music festivals and as many Andrei Sakharov International art festivals
held in Nizhny Novgorod.
Russia’s top pianists, violinists, cellists and singers feel honored to
perform with Alexander Skulsky and his orchestra. The conductor plays off
the soloists quickly adapting to their every turn and nuance, all resulting
in a combination that is as insuring as it is interesting from a professional
point of view. Impassionate, driven, friendly and a great communicator
always bubbling with new jokes, that’s Alexander Skulsky. Restrained, measured,
punctual and businesslike – that’s Alexander Skulsky too, loved by his
orchestra and idolized by students at the local conservatory where he teaches
symphony conducting…
He has a great family of an organ playing wife, a son - a gifted engineer,
a daughter in law who is a designer and now a tiny granddaughter too…
Any hobbies? Well, I guess Alexander’s only hobby is music which is also
his work, love and inspiration...
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