The year was 1923. Breaking free from the past, Soviet Russia
was trying to build a new life. The problem, however, was that tearing
down is something that comes easily to all and only a chosen few really
know how to create new things. The same thing rings true with the arts…
In 1923, the Russian musicians were bitterly split, but there
was one thing they all agreed on and that was their resolute break with
the classical traditions of old…
Members of the Association of Contemporary Music embraced everything
that was ultramodern and propagated music by Russian and foreign composers.
Unfazed by the complexity of those modernistic compositions, the Association's
leaders were determined that "the new times should spawn new styles
in music and even if only few people can understand it now, someday it
will be appreciated by millions."
Pitted against the ACM were the proponents of the so-called proletarian
art. "Who needs all these operas and symphonies?" they wondered.
"We need to write something people can understand…"
And write they did, churning out an avalanche of overly patriotic
poems and cantatas all praising to the skies the Soviet government, the
Bolshevist party and the glorious Red Army. Some of those creations were
really good, though, most notably the song about a young revolutionary
who sacrificed his life for the lofty ideas he believed in. The song, called
Orlyonok, which means an eaglet, was written by composer Viktor Bely who
was a leading member of the Proletarian Musicians' Association.
In the spring of 1923, students at the Moscow Conservatory were
preparing for their usual end of the year exams. Violinist Vasily Shirinsky,
who was to play as part of a string quartet, asked some of his fellow students
to come over and practice together. The young people thought they would
play a couple of things during the exam and split, but, instead, they stuck
together for a whole 40 years!…
In the fall, Vasily and Sergei Shirinsky, Dmitry Tsyganov and
Vadim Borisovsky made their first public performance following up on the
initial success of the 16 quartets by Beethoven they played with such brilliant
finesse that the whole outfit was eventually named after the great German
composer.
Our life is full of surprises and people in the arts will never
miss a chance to recall how his or her whole life changed in a matter of
minutes and will tell you about the close relationship existing between
the stage and success.
…When one of the Bolshoi Theater's ballet conductors fell ill,
the young violinist Yuri Fayer ventured to stand in. A man of exceptional
memory, he knew the score by heart and had even spent some time taking
lessons in conducting.
The debut was a resounding success. Impressed by the Yuri's masterful
performance, they asked him to conduct another ballet and, before long,
Yuri Fayer was already working as a full-time conductor presiding over
the Bolshoi's biggest productions…
The great ballerina Galina Ulanova would say that "dancing
under Fayer's baton was more than just fun, it gave us confidence and a
sense of absolute freedom."
"Fayer devles deep inside the very soul of music,"
raved Sergei Prokofyev, "His every performance is a celebration!"
"In the ballets conducted by Yuri Fayer, music and dance
come together resulting in a single whole," said the great Russian
ballerina Maya Plisetskaya.
Everyone's darling, Yuri Fayer conducted the Bolshoi's orchestra
through a whopping 60 ballets in nearly 50 years of touring in Europe,
the United States and Japan.
The Moscow Philharmonic Society, still hurting from the hard-hitting
financial crisis of the previous few months, had gone joint-stock and was
now doing pretty well playing more and better than they did before…
In 1923 musicians from all over the world started coming in attracted
by the very comfortable contracts offered them in Soviet Russia. One of
the first to come was the leading German conductor Bruno Walther who held
the post of a "generalmusikaldirektor" in Munich and was also
at the head of the prestigious Mozart and Wagner music festivals.
Also in 1923 they brought back the Russian Folk Orchestra formed
in 1886 by the famed balalaika virtuoso Vasilky Andreyev. After his death
the orchestra broke up only to be now formed anew under the name of its
founding father…
The Vasily Andreyev orchestra soon became one of the country's
foremost folk music outfits and is still very much liked today.
In November, the 23-year-old singer of Gypsy songs Tamara Tsereteli
made her first solo performance on stage at the Moscow Conservatory. Once
an aspiring opera singer, she would have been very much surprised if someone
had told her that, some day, she would be standing there singing Gypsy
songs. Which is exactly what happened when they asked her to sing a Gypsy
song for a drama performance. She did and the whole performance immediately
ground to a halt with people crying "Bravo!" and "Encore!"
That was how Tamara Tseretali became a songstress of Gypsy songs…
Tamara Tsereteli eventually worked her way up to the very top
of this country's variety scene enjoying rave accounts from the leading
actors, writers and stage directors, including the great Konstantin Stanislavsky
himself. Taking part in her traditional New Year concerts were the famed
actor Mikhail Chekhov, violin virtuoso David Oistrakh and a number of leading
singers from the Bolshoi Opera. Tamara Tsereteli still managed to cut through
this veritable constellation of world-class performers…
In that same year of 1923, the inimitable crooner Leonid Utyosov
gave his first concert reading excerpts from Dostoyevsky, singing songs
from an operetta by Jacques Offenbach, playing the violin, dancing and
belting out all kinds of circus stunts. The performance was a huge success,
people in the audience and those crammed high up in "the gods"
were going berserk on this first day of Utyosov's climb to stardom. Before
very long, he emerged as the best-loved singer of Soviet songs…
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.
