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1954
             
On November 6, the Communist party bigwigs were attending a gala concert at the Bolshoi celebrating the 37th anniversary of the 1917 socialist revolution. The traditional pomp and circumstance of the laudatory speeches over, the gathering segued into a concert by the country's leading performers. The concert started off with a Festival Overture written for the occasion by the foremost Soviet composer Dmitry Shostakovich.
This fanfare music soon became one of Shostakovich's best-loved pieces. 26 years later, the Festival Overture became the musical signature of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
Meanwhile, the 22 year old Rodion Shchedrin was working on his first major piece, a piano concerto which he chose for his graduation concert at the Moscow Conservatory. That he opted for a piano concerto was not surprising at all, however, because Shchedrin was also an excellent pianist. At the Conservatory, he studied composition and piano all at the same time and the new concerto brought out to the max his outstanding abilities in both…
Shchedrin's concerto created quite a stir with its natural combination of musical innovation and the traditional Russian rhymed ditties which eventually found their way into many of Shchedrin's works and even became part and parcel of his signature style.
Rodion Shchedrin still likes playing his first concerto and he did it again during his 65th birthday concert held in the Conservatory Big Hall on December 16, 1997…
In Moscow, the Bolshoi Theater was presenting The Stone Flower - Sergei Prokofyev's last ballet. The composer never lived to see the premiere of his brainchild, which was shunned and ignored for such a long time. Now, as if trying to expiate their past sins, the Bolshoi Ballet was working hard on the production, which was handled by the formidable choreographer Leonid Lavrovsky of the Romeo and Juliet and Cinderella fame. Dancing the lead parts was a constellation of Bolshoi superstars, including Galina Ulanova.
Just as the Bolshoi Ballet was presenting The Stone Flower, the theater's opera company led by the chief conductor Alexander Melik-Pashayev, took up Beethoven's all-time classic Fidelio which had never before been staged in Moscow.
A seasoned master, with about 25 major Bolshoi productions under his belt, Melik-Pashayev took his new commission very close to heart writing in his memoirs that:
"Never before had I been so overwhelmingly carried away and enchanted by anything I had ever worked on throughout my entire career. I did a lot of looking up things that were shedding additional light on the stage history of Beethoven's much suffering opera. I just wanted to prove wrong the critics who claimed Fidelio was generally a feeble and mediocre effort…"
The premiere was a resounding success and, on October 28, the orchestra was already playing Fidelio under the hand of the famous German conductor Herman Abendroth, one of the best interpreters of Beethoven's music of his time.
"The Bolshoi's production will always be on my mind," Abendroth wrote after the performance, "Each measure literally breathes with the amazing work done by my colleague Alexander Melik-Pashayev. The whole thing is Beethoven at his best. It's simply unbelievable!"
In November, the outstanding Russian violinist David Oistrakh made his first tour of Britain playing a solo concert in the very prestigious Albert Hall. It just so happened that, at the very same time, the equally great American violinist, Yasha Kheifetz, was playing at the Royal Festival Hall. The critics were at a loss unable to decide which of the two was more worthy of their attention. Many of them eventually agreed that comparing the two maestros was just like equating the Sun and the Moon.
From Britain, Oistrakh moved on to Japan and the United States, his other two firsts, where he created a big stir prompting the famous critic Howard Taubman to call him "a real wizard".
The Russian violinist won the hearts of thousands of Americans and the friendship of such outstanding musicians as Eugene Ormandy, Isaak Stern and Grigory Pyatigorsky.
In 1954 the 24 year-old graduate of the Urals Conservatory Boris Shtokolov joined the Sverdlovsk opera company. Four years and 12 leading parts later, he signed up with Leningrad's Kirov opera and ballet theater where he worked for more than 30 years.
Tall and imposing, Boris Shtokolov created a very special atmosphere any time he came out on stage singing the drama-packed parts of Boris Godunov and King Philip.
For all his operatic clout, however, Boris Shtokolov was even better known as an absolutely wonderful performer of chamber music whose 2 or 3 minute miniatures created such a long-lasting impression on his listeners. He was especially good singing old Russian love songs and folk songs and Those Evening Bells was one of his all-time hits…
The lyrical comedy True Friends, which came out in 1954, featured a constellation of brilliant Russian actors. It's about childhood pals who, many years on make up their mind to hark back to the days of yore and, building a raft, sail down the big river to beautiful songs contributed by composer Tikhon Khrennikov…
The film is still popular today and some of its songs have found their way into the repertoire of many leading Russian singers.
Putting Faithfulness to the Test came out in the same year. It is a rather feeble effort and wouldn't have deserved mention here had it not been the last work by the outstanding composer Isaak Dunayevsky.
But even in such an uninspiring movie like that, Dunayevsky still retained his ability to write music which, decades on, still warms the people's hearts ...
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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