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1940
             
Five years after its completion, Sergei Prokofyev's controversial ballet Romeo and Juliet continued stirring up critical emotions. Commissioned to write the score for the Bolshoi Ballet back in 1934, Prokofyev completed the assignment on time only to see his work shunned by the theater's managers and forced to put it off till better times. Before very long, the new ballet by the seasoned master gained attention in Europe and in 1938 it was produced in Brno, Czechoslovakia and later here in Russia.
Prokofyev played the score to choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky who was very impressed and vowed to produce it on stage of Leningrad's Kirov Opera at any cost. Galina Ulanova was to dance Juliet's part but she didn't think it was a good idea…
"I didn't like Prokofyev's music a tiny bit," Ulanova later recalled. "It seemed absolutely unmelodic and undanceable. I simply couldn't memorize the tunes. It sounded so weird to us, weaned on classical music. It took me some time to get used to it and I eventually fell so crazily in love with it that I just couldn't imagine anything else that would be so perfectly well with Shakespeare's famous theme…"
The Russian premiere came in Leningrad on January 11, 1940. Leonid Lavrovsky's excellent production was perfectly germane to Sergei Prokofyev's music. The success was dramatic and the music critics all wrote glowing reviews extolling the power of Prokofyev's new ballet. These days Romeo and Juliet is one of the most frequently performed ballets around the world.
The year 1940 brought many premieres for Prokofyev. June 23 saw the first performance in Moscow of his new opera titled I Am the Son of the Working People which he later changed to the name of the hero, a Red Army warrior, Semyon Kotko. It was based on a patently Soviet theme bringing back the years of the Sovietization of Ukraine during the Civil War.
Prokofyev didn't go the way of many of his colleagues who were writing modern operas using the simplistic language of the communist banners. It is thanks to its beautiful music that Semyon Kotko has not been discarded as a political anachronism and is still admired as a real masterpiece. …"In the summer of 1940 I was staying at my dacha near Moscow," composer Aram Khachaturian recalled in his memoirs. "My window opened up right into the forest. I woke up in the morning and started writing my violin concerto. I was in seventh heaven awaiting the birth of my firstborn who I hoped would a son. Needless to say, my general euphoria and the high hopes brushed off on my music. Violinist David Oistrakh would come over to my place from Moscow to play the finished parts. It was very important because I was writing the concerto with his performance in mind.
Khachaturian's Violin Concerto was first performed in the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on November 16, 1940. The constellation of celebrities who showed up for the premiere would easily make anyone salivate. The concerto was a deafening success and that night Khachaturian was also being congratulated with the birth of his much-awaited son!
On November 23 the Beethoven string quartet was presenting Dmitry Shostakovich's new quintet. The composer was sitting in on the piano…
"My initial desire was to write a quartet," Shostakovich later admitted, "but I got so carried away by the music that I felt the urge to play too. That's how I added the piano part which I wrote with my playing abilities in mind."
The author Marietta Shaginyan who was at the premiere, thus described her impressions of Shostakovich's new work:
"The moment the members of the absolutely great Beethoven quartet raised their bows, the very young Shostakovich put his hands on the keys and the first sounds of music broke the dead silence, we all bent forward as if hating to miss a single note, just like the rain-starved land opens up under the first drops of a God-given downpour… I'd heard a lot of good music before, but this one was something absolutely special. Shostakovich's quintet is a work of a genius. It's like a bowl filled to the brim and demonstrating its exclusiveness and energy…"
Sergei Rakhmaninoff who left Russia back in 1917 to make a home in the United States, was now running desperately out of new ideas. "Leaving Russia I lost my ability to compose," he said bitterly.
Universally acclaimed as the finest pianist of his time, Rakhmaninoff was never really successful in the West as a composer. His music looked very traditional and the 1940 premiere of the Symphonic Dances did little to sway that opinion. Only the more intuitive critics appreciated the true significance of Rakhmaninoff's new work which, decades after was touted as a symbol of the whole epoch. Small wonder that we now use one of its themes as a call tune for this program.
May 7 was the centennial birthday of Pyotr Tchaikovsky who is by far and without doubt Russia's best-loved composer. As part of a series of nationwide anniversary celebrations, they opened a museum in the composer's little hometown of Votkinsk in the Urals displaying a large number of personal items once used by Tchaikovsky and his family.
Musical theaters across the nation had prepared anniversary Tchaikovsky operas and ballets and the state-run Muzyka publishers turned out a complete collection of Tchaikovsky's works. In Moscow they opened a new concert hall appropriately naming it after the great composer. The opening concert there was broadcast on radio nationwide.
In Moscow, the Bolshoi Opera presented The Valkirye, a music drama in three acts by the great German composer Richard Wagner. Produced by the famous Soviet movie director Sergei Eizenstein, the opera was a cultural landmark…
Also in 1940 the government instituted national awards for top achievements in science, literature and the arts. There were three degrees of very prestigious awards known as the Stalin Prizes.
In May more than 400 musicians were taking part in a citywide music festival in Leningrad.
Also in Leningrad, the Lenfilm studios turned out A Musical Story - a movie about a lorry driver who makes a headspinning operatic career. The main character was played by the famous tenor Sergei Lemeshev. After the film came out, Lemeshev, already very popular, developed such a huge following that his fans formed a whole movement of the so-called "Lemeshevites."
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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