In 1925 Soviet Russia was busily building a new life and new
art forms.
Responding to the authorities' penchant for larger-than-life
monumentalism, architects were designing gigantic avenues and squares and
directors were coming up with impressive open-air extravaganzas which brought
together thousands of dancers, athletes, choirs and orchestras, all meant
to showcase the free and happy life lived by the Soviet people…
Art was open to experimentation and the most popular Soviet poet
Vladimir Mayakovsky urged people not to hold back, be creative, use their
imagination and just go for it... In music, where different styles were
still coexisting peacefully together, the 25 year-old composer Alexander
Mosolov was looking desperately for new musical forms and subjects. One
day he was writing songs based on private newspaper ads and the next day
he was already trying to emulate in music the noise made by those rumbling
factory lathes…
Alexander Mosolov soon emerged as a leading member of the Soviet
musical avant-garde and, as such, was being watched with growing interest
in the West.
After the initial euphoria about all those innovations had subsided,
Mosolov and many other proponents of the avant-garde were stigmatized as
"formalists" which was the worst thing that could ever happen
to someone in Soviet Russia. They simply stopped playing his music and,
to survive, Alexander Mosolov was forced to repent and start writing the
right stuff. And write he did spending the rest of his life churning out
all kinds of pseudo folk songs about the Soviet collective farmers being
so happy and carefree living in their villages…
Composer Sergei Prokofyev who had left Russia back in 1918, was
at different times living in Europe and in America. He was writing profusely
and his music was widely performed on both sides of the Atlantic. Apparently
disappointed by the June 1925 premiere of his Second Symphony in Paris,
Prokofyev wrote a letter to his old friend Nikolai Myaskovsky in Moscow
complaining that the symphony had left a sense of complete perplexity.
"I guess I messed it all up so much," he wrote, "that I
could hardly figure it out myself…" Years later, Prokofyev re-wrote
parts of his Second Symphony.
In 1925 the Iron Curtain was still up and some of the pieces
Prokofyev had written in emigration found their way into the Soviet Union,
including the Old Grandmother's Tales piano cycle, Five Melodies Without
Words, and The Overture On Hebrew Themes he wrote in the United States
in 1919.
The Overture On Hebrew Themes was written at the request by his
onetime Conservatory coursemates who were then looking desperately for
concert dates in America. Written especially for their band by the already
fashionable Sergei Prokofyev, The Overture made the Russian emigre musicians
immediately popular.
In Leningrad, the company of the Mariinsky Theater, now called
the State Opera and Ballet Theater had taken on board a new singer, Mark
Reizen who had come from the Ukraine after graduating from an institute
of technology and a conservatory. Mark Reizen thus described his debut
on the stage of the country's leading theater:
"Leningrad literally blew me away with its magnificent beauty,
to say nothing of the theater itself with its gilded, multi-tiered hall,
excellent scenery made by the best Russian artists, wonderful costumes
and a closely-knit orchestra playing with clockwork precision… I was breathless
and scared… Thank God, my first performance went off well, I was accepted
and was immediately heaped with work. The whole thing was like a dream
come true - a beginning soloist, I was given leading parts from Boris Godunov
to Don Basilio in Rossini's The Barber of Seville…"
Mark Reizen soon emerged as a leading operatic authority admired
both in and outside this country…
In 1925 they held the first national competition of Soviet string
quartets and the first prize went to the Glazunov Quartet from Leningrad
who impressed the jury by their excellent teamwork and their great attention
to detail. After their groundbreaking performance in Moscow, the Glazunov
Quartet successfully toured in Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium and France
where a well-known reviewer hailed them as a "first-class outfit that,
from now on, will definitely stand out from all the other world quartets."
Vadim Borisovsky came to teach at the Moscow Conservatory in
1925. A member of the famed Beethoven string quartet and the founding father
of the Soviet school of playing viola and its medieval forerunner, the
viola d'amour, he made numerous arrangements and transcriptions for both
leaving behind a list of all existing compositions written especially for
these two instruments. Vadim Borisovsky spawned a number of musicians who
made the history of viola playing in this country, like, for example, Yuri
Bashmet and other leading players.
In Paris, the Russian composer Alexander Chesnokov finished his
Requiem of the Mystery of Death, or, the Russian Requiem" where the
honors graduate of the Petersburg Conservatory bemoaned Russia, seized
by the Bolsheviks who had forced into emigration so many of her devoted
sons…
Shortly after the 1917 socialist revolution, Alexander Chesnokov
moved to Prague and eventually settled down in Paris. Hard pressed for
money, he started making music-hall arrangements for a tiny publishing
company writing his own music at odd moments. Very little of what he wrote
during that struggling period has been preserved, but he did manage, however,
to send the Requiem to his brother in Moscow and now, decades on we can
finally enjoy it…
Izabella Yuryeva, then a young, beginning singer, also made her
debut in 1925. She immediately won the people's hearts with her unusual
timbre, the heartfelt sincerity and warmth which she injected into the
old Russian love songs she sung…
Izabella Yuryeva made a head-spinning career and in the late
1920s people were scrambling to get to her concerts and her records were
selling like hot cakes. Her voice had become a trademark of her time …
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.
