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1960
             
The increasingly aging and ailing Dmitry Shostakovich was now spending much time consulting with his doctors and sometimes even going to hospital complaining about some strange feebleness in his right arm…
"I just can't lift weights," he wrote in a letter to a friend explaining his bad handwriting, "I can pick up a heavy suitcase with my fingers but I can't slip an overcoat on a hanger. Brushing my teeth is a near impossibility now and my hand tires real quick when I'm writing. I can only play the piano very slowly and very quietly. Just in case, I've been doing workouts with my hand scribbling letters and figures. It's such a useless drag!"
The "priests of science" he jokingly called his doctors, were unable to determine the cause of the illness and were continuously switching from one treatment to another none of which was able to ease Shostakovich's plight. Even minor frustrations and nervousness immediately unraveled the doctors' efforts and still, the composer kept working on…
"In July I was in Dresden, a very scenic place they call a Saxonian Switzerland," Shostakovich wrote a friend. "They are shooting a film there and they commissioned me to write the music but I wrote a new quartet instead…"
"This is a useless and ideologically flawed composition," Shostakovich said. "I'd been thinking that if I died tomorrow, no one would ever write a dedication to my memory, and so I decided to do it myself. We could appropriately call it a "Dedication to the Memory of the Man Who Wrote This Quartet." It's a concoction of old themes and I have shed a lot of tears writing it."
On October 2, the Eighth Quartet premiered in the Small Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic. The author did not dare to present the tragic composition as autobiographical and formally dedicated it to the memory of the victims of Nazism and war…
In Moscow, the Bolshoi Theater was unveiling The Hunchback Horse written by the 27 year old composer Rodion Shchedrin. Choreographer Alexander Radunsky translated the composer's beautifully expressive score into a colorful spectacle, a stirring combination of lyricism and humor, hard driving folklore and magic…
The musical presentation was handled by the young and very talented conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky. The would-be maestro enthusiastically took up the job. Another newcomer was Vladimir Vasilyev whose brilliant performance of the ballet's main character became the start of one of the most successful careers in modern ballet...
Dancing the main female part was the formidable Maya Plisetskaya and on the very first day she joined in the act, Shchedrin's fate was sealed... Soon after, the ballerina and the composer tied the knot and have been inseparable ever since stunning the artistic world by the strength of their time-tested partnership…
In Moscow, the 30 year-old composer Edison Denisov was presenting his works. A native of Tomsk, one of the biggest cities in Siberia, he had originally been more into math than he was into music and had even graduated from Tomsk University's school of physics and mathematics before entering the composers' department of the Moscow Conservatory.
His early compositions are immediately reminiscent of Dmitry Shostakovich who was a good friend of Denisov - a man destined to blaze new trails in music, prepare the ground for a new musical esthetics and inspire several generations of Russian musicians…
88 operatic hopefuls from all across the nation were showcasing their skills participating in the first national competition of young opera singers in Moscow. Leningrad Conservatory graduates put up a very formidable performance bowing out with all the top awards available…
The famed American composer Aaron Copland made his debut in Moscow and Leningrad offering the Russian listeners a very unorthodox mix of classical and jazz music…
Meanwhile, the outstanding Russian cellist Svyatoslav Knushevitsky crossed the Atlantic to take part in a festival organized in Mexico by the great Pablo Casals and to become one of the first Russian musicians to play south of the Rio Grande. The performance by the man whose musical genius had largely been hidden behind Stalin's infamous Iron Curtain, became a real revelation to the Mexicans…
Kirill Kondrashin took the helm of the Moscow Philharmonic's Symphony Orchestra as part of a major reshuffle of the country's leading orchestras. His 15 year stint was, by far and without doubt, the heyday in the history of the world-acclaimed orchestra.
Veronika Dudarova took over as the head of another Moscow symphony orchestra. An ethnic Ossetian and a Moscow Conservatory graduate, she became the first woman conductor in Russia…
Another gifted lady, Nina Meshko, took up the reins of the Northern Russian Choir and quickly turned it into one of the best folk outfits in the country. Forty years on, Nina Meshko is still at the head of her much-acclaimed choir…
The young baritone Yuri Gulyayev joined an opera company in Sverdlovsk, immediately endearing himself to the local music buffs with his enchantingly warm voice bubbling with young happiness and candor of a man enjoying every single moment of his life… Versatile and hard-working, Gulyayev eagerly took up every operatic part they offered him, combining serious music with equally electrifying performances of old Russian love songs, folk and modern pop songs.
Before long, Yuri Gulyayev literally stormed onto the most prestigious venues in Moscow, joining the Bolshoi Opera and becoming a national heartthrob and a must feature of almost every single TV music show they aired back in those days ...
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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