In autumn, the Moscow Philharmonic was opening a new season with
a record 500-plus concerts played throughout the year.
The concerts included performances by the prominent French composer
Arthur Honegger, the Swiss conductor Ernest Ansermet and the German maestro
Otto Klemperer who said that the concerts he had in Moscow were the best
thing that had ever happened to his musical career. "The Grand Hall
of the Moscow Conservatory with its unique acoustical characteristics is
absolutely fantastic!" he raved, "they have some really wonderful
orchestras in Moscow, but, above all, it is the people there, so warm,
appreciative and understanding…"
In 1928 they set up a new symphony orchestra under the Moscow
Philharmonic Society. It was also decided that this first-class outfit
would not have a chief conductor and that the program would be chosen by
a special panel which would also invite conductors to lead the orchestra
through concrete performances.
The newly-formed outfit, appropriately called The New Symphony
Orchestra, and conducted by Nikolai Golovanov, had its first public performance
on November 16 in the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory playing the
Requiem by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
In 1926 Professor Pavel Lamm of Moscow was commissioned by the
Soviet State Publishing Department, which had grown out the famous Pyotr
Yurgenson Publishing House, to prepare the original score of Modest Mussorgsky's
Boris Godunov opera. The famed musicologist who supervised the publication,
restored the episodes and whole scenes, which Mussorgsky had been forced
to throw out at the insistence of his censors and in 1928 Boris Godunov,
in both its original versions of 1869 and 1872 was finally available in
print. Before that, Mussorgsky's opera had for many decades been played
in the drastically altered version made by his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
Working like a restoration artist, Pavel Lamm carefully reworked the bowdlerized
version finally presenting the great opera in its original form…
In Leningrad, Sofya Preobrazhenskaya, then an aspiring, 24 year-old
singer, was making her debut at the city's Opera and Ballet Theater, formerly
known as the Mariinsky Theater.
Tall and stately, Sofya Preobrazhenskaya was ideally suited for
playing larger-than-life heroes on stage and her brilliant performance
of Jeanne d'Arc's part in Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans opera was one
of her greatest professional achievements…
"Her deep and sonorous voice is so stirring that it immediately
puts your heart aflutter," raved a critic, "and her acting is
so fantastic that you just can's relax and think about something else.
She's a genius!"
Sofya Preobrazhenskaya awed her audiences for thirty years performing
about 50 parts each being a revelation highlighting ever new sides of her
enormous talent…
In 1928 the young pianist from Leningrad Vladimir Sofronitsky
was making his first ever European tour and, overwhelmed by the romantic
pathos of his playing, people in Warsaw and Paris cried and moaned while
the critics were heaping praise on the young Russian musician.
"When this young man is playing there is no way you can
possibly get yourself to analyze what is happening," exulted the flabbergasted
French critics. "It is one bubbling stream of feelings, so alive,
beautiful and filled with inspiration…"
It was the only time Vladimir Sofronitsky was allowed to play
abroad. Very shortly after, he, just like many other Soviet musicians like
him, found themselves sealed behind the infamous Iron Curtain that came
down to shut off Stalin's Russia from the rest of the world…
In 1928 Alexander Glazunov, a prominent composer and the longtime
director of the Leningrad Conservatory, left Russia, ostensibly to join
the jury of the Franz Schubert Competition which they were going to have
in Vienna. It was only a pretext though… A refined intellectual and a brilliant
musician, Glazunov could never fully comprehend and embrace the new Soviet
reality. Gone were years of trials and tribulations of the revolution and
the civil war when Glazunov spent days and nights looking desperately for
firewood to keep his students warm, was fixing the rusted pipes and thinking
how to feed his famine-stricken students and faculty. He had also weathered
all the official nitpicking and had even given up his spacious apartment
and now that the worst things were finally over, his nerves gave out…
Glazunov started feeling sorry for the lost years and he hoped
that, once he had obtained a much-deserved peace of mind, he would be able
to write music again… But in Paris where he settled down shortly after,
people were looking down on the Russian emigrants. Too tired to start it
all over again, Glazunov spent the last few years of his life an lonely
and financially-strapped old man who lived in the past and cherished the
occasional performances of his previous works which, unfortunately, were
so few and far between…
December 1, 1928, saw the first ever concert played by the Red
Army Song and Dance Ensemble. There were eight singers, two dancers, an
accordion player and a reciter in the band that was led by the brilliant
choir conductor and composer Alexander Alexandrov, formerly a precentor
at Moscow's largest Cathedral of Christ the Savior. Joining the Red Army,
Alexandrov embraced a very different repertoire and before he knew it,
his ensemble was already one of the best loved in the whole country…
"The Soviet soldiers have taken the whole of Europe prisoner
without firing a single shot", went an admiring Western account, "Their
weapon is the most accurate and peaceful around - it's a song…"
The first Soviet jazz records started appearing also in 1928.
They were recorded by Ama-Jazz band led by pianist and composer Alexander
Tsvasman, a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory. Holed up in a small studio
in the downtown, the band churned out four records with eight catchy dance
tunes. The records sold out immediately…
In Leningrad, the Theatrical Jazz Band, Thea-Jazz for short,
was organized in the same year by the already famous singer Leonid Utyosov.
A man of outstanding talent, he thrilled his audiences by playing the violin,
conducting the orchestra and singing all at the same time. Along with more
traditional numbers, Thea-Jazz also played musical parodies and sketches
drawing angry flak from the critics:
"Why on earth should a Soviet citizen, the builder of a
new society need a low farce like this?!" thundered such irritated
reviewer…
The people, however, were going absolutely mad about Utyosov
and I even suspect that at odd moments, the critics themselves could often
be heard quietly humming his funny song under their nose…
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH
CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.
