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1945
             
The year 1945 went down in history as the year of the final routing of the Nazi aggressor and the end of World War Two. Unvanquished by the enemy, the Soviet army made it all the way to Berlin. The time had finally come to sing new songs of victory…
In Berlin, the Russian soldiers were writing their names on the Reichstag walls and the popular Russian entertainers were singing and dancing on the steps of what only recently was the ultimate embodiment of Hitler's power. The famous Russian folk singer Lidiya Ruslanova was also there…
On June 24 they were holding a Victory parade in Moscow. Stepping out on the Red Square cobblestones were thousands upon thousands of Soviet army soldiers, still hurting after four long years of bloody battles. They were measuring their pace to the strains of a new march, written by Semyon Chernetsky especially for the event, and played by a thousand-strong military band.
The much-awaited victory came in May, but the Soviet people had been living in sweet anticipation ever since the start of the year. That heady feeling that the war was just about to end was also very much evident in the new works being written by the Soviet composers. On January 13 the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatory saw the premiere of Sergei Prokofyev's Fifth Symphony which is one of the composer's most profound wartime compositions.
The concert started off in a very unusual way. Prokofyev, who conduct the orchestra, came out on stage, raised his hands and, all of a sudden, there came the sounds of an artillery salute as Moscow was celebrating the fall of several more big German cities… The multicolored flashes of the fireworks reflected in the large vaulted windows of the Big Hall… When the deafening sounds of cannon fire had died away, Prokofyev raised his baton and the orchestra started to play…
"This symphony is a reflection of the trials and tribulations this country had gone through the past few years," Sergei Prokofyev said, "I wrote it to showcase the grandeur of the human soul…"
November 21 of the same year saw the first performance of Prokofyev's new ballet, Cinderella. In Moscow and Leningrad, the Bolshoi and Kirov theaters were busily working on the new production. The Bolshoi was the first to finish the work though. Choreographer Rostislav Zakharov offered a very inspiring and romantically charged show attenuating yet another facet of the larger-than-life talent of one of the greatest ballerinas of all time, Galina Ulanova…
The ballet was a thundering success! In a rave account published in the newspaper Pravda, Dmitry Shostakovich wrote: "This is a veritable landmark bringing out the overall feeling of jubilation felt by our people who know full well the price of Good's victory over the dark forces of Evil…"
In November they held in Moscow another national competition of young musicians. For a country, still lying in ruins left by the devastating war, it was a moral feat indeed to hold such a talent-quest competition which offered veritable constellation of young prodigies!
In the pianists' department, the first prize went to Svyatoslav Richter, the previous year's gold medallist of the Moscow Conservatory who played a two-part solo concert in place of his regular graduation exam. It became immediately clear that there was a new star of a global caliber fast rising over Russia's musical horizon…
In the cello section, the 18-year-old Mstislav Rostropovich created a big stir "outplaying" his older and much more seasoned colleagues.
In the singers' contest, the top award landed in the hands of the Bolshoi theater's young singer Veronika Borisenko, the proud owner of a very rich and smooth contralto.
In January a string orchestra made up of Moscow Conservatory students had their first performance in Moscow. Shortly before their debut in the Small Hall of the Conservatory, the young musicians, all madly in love with their profession, wrote the charter of their orchestra. Article 1 said that "Our quartet will play forever and will keep doing so until after the last one of its members has departed this world…" The young romantics signed the document with their own blood and it can still be found in the family archives of the quartet's long-serving cellist Valentin Berlinsky….
Six years later, the quartet named itself after the great 19th century Russian composer Alexander Borodin and has since become one of the world's best-renowned chamber outfits. The Borodin quartet has won a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records and next year they will celebrate their 55 years in the music business.
In November the venerable Yehudi Menukhin flew into Moscow at the start of the great violinist's first ever tour of this country. Menukhin had a very special reason to take interest in Russia since his parents originated from this country. They left Russia shortly before the revolution and settled down in the United States. They kept speaking Russian at home and retained strong memories of their native land.
On November 16 and 17 Menukhin played two concerts in the Big Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, partnering on stage with one of Russia's leading pianists Lev Oborin, the winner of the prestigious Chopin competition in Warsaw. They later used recordings made during those two concerts to turn out a long-playing record of the maestro's unforgettable performance…
Yehudi Menukhin immediately became the darling of the Moscow music buffs. In an interview with the newspaper Izvestiya, he said: " I'm thrilled to be back to the country where my parents once lived. I saw here people filled with enthusiasm and hope for a happy future. And you have every right to be happy with your great victory in the most terrible war fought during this century…"
Russia was gradually emerging from the ruin and destruction left by the war and memories of that terrible carnage were still vivid in the minds of the soldiers who fought so selflessly for their country. In 1945 composer Anatoly Novikov wrote one of the most heartfelt songs about the war. It's called The Roads We Choose …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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