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1961
             
The Fourth Symphony Dmitry Shostakovich wrote back in 1936 but which had since been kept under wraps, finally premiered in the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow. Back in the mid-Thirties, the composer was officially lambasted for alleged "formalism" and the Fourth Symphony would most certainly have fallen prey to even more vicious criticism because it was dedicated to an old friend, Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky, who had just been declared "an enemy of the people" and executed. Shostakovich's chances of sharing his friend's tragic fate were pretty high given the popularity of the old adage about friends being all the same...
Shostakovich never ventured to have his new symphony played in public even though the Leningrad Philharmonic orchestra was already rehearsing it. He declared the symphony a failure thus saving the score and, maybe, his very life itself. Now, with the onset of Khrushchev's liberalization, the Fourth Symphony finally saw daylight…
The Fourth Symphony opened in triumph not least on the strength of a very convincing performance by the Moscow Philharmonic orchestra led by Kirill Kondrashin who had painstakingly rehearsed the technically very challenging composition. Shortly after its resoundingly successful first performance, the Fourth Symphony hit the world with Eugene Ormandi being the first foreign conductor to take it up.
Meanwhile, the young and increasingly successful composer Rodion Shchedrin was putting the finishing touches to his first opera "About Love and More…" which was then quickly taken up by the Bolshoi Theater.
The opera, written for a generally uninspiring libretto about the bitter love of a young collective farm chairwoman, still boasts some of the best music Shchedrin has ever written weaving his melodies seamlessly into the background of Russian folk tunes.
"About Love and More…" became one of the best operas about contemporary Soviet life and has since been extensively played across the country…
Russia's number one pianist Svyatoslav Richter received the much-coveted Lenin Prize. With the Iron Curtain a little up now and international contacts no longer banned, Richter was fast emerging a world celebrity. Awed by his caliber and mind-boggling technique, the best impresarios, concert hall directors and conductors from all around the world were scrambling for his attention...
Another proud winner of the 1961 Lenin Prize was the conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky who, in the past 23 years, had led his Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra to national and international prominence. The orchestra had just come off a triumphal tour of Western Europe giving 34 concerts in 7 countries and wrapping up the tour with an electrifying performance at a music festival in Edinburgh.
The 30-year-old Gennady Rozhdestvensky is appointed chief conductor of the Moscow Radio Symphony Orchestra to become Russia's youngest chief conductor.
An extraordinarily endowed musician, Rozhdestvensky had already spent ten years at the head of a junior symphony orchestra which had already won several international awards.
Shortly after joining the Bolshoi orchestra, Rozhdestvensky radically overhauled its repertoire replacing the textbook classical numbers with a slew of rarely played medieval music and giving life to many new compositions as well…
The famed violinist David Oistrakh, meanwhile, was trying his hand in conducting to realize a childhood dream of someday leading a symphony orchestra.
"The sound of a symphony orchestra playing is the strongest and the most indelible impression I picked up when I was still a kid," Oistrakh said. "The magic was still there and the sense gradually translated into a burning desire to try to put my hands on it…"
A virtual novice to the profession, David Oistrakh compensated his lack of formal training by drawing extensively from Otto Klemperer, Herbert von Karajan, Eugene Ormandi and other great conductors he chanced to work with…
"To me, conducting is more than just pleasure, it gives me purpose to work on and opens up a whole new world for me," admitted the violinist-turned-conductor for whom the latter was increasingly becoming an all-important part of his musical endeavor.
Meanwhile, the city of Gorky was playing host to Russia's first festival of modern music, which was also the first music festival ever held there since 1917. Unfortunately, because Gorky was one of the so-called "closed" cities, neither foreign performers nor listeners were able to attend the groundbreaking event…
Young Russian musicians continued raising international eyebrows with singer Emma Sarkisyan named the winner of the prestigious Georghe Enesku festival in Bucharest…
…Cellist Natalya Gutman winning at the Antonin Dvorak competition in Prague…
…Pianist Marina Mdivani bowing out with the gold medal won at the Marguerite Long competition in Paris…
… And the Moscow Conservatory's chamber orchestra led by Mikhail Terian winning the first prize at the Herbert von Karajan competition in West Berlin…
In Moscow, Vladimir Vysotsky, who had just joined the company of the very popular Taganka Theater, was writing songs, which went so good with the guitar! His husky and immediately recognizable voice was blaring out of millions of tape recorders all across the nation making some people just laugh at his humor, and others see a more serious, sometimes even tragic, connotation hiding behind the author's nonchalant singing manner…
Vysotsky's all-stops-out daring didn't sit well with the staid Soviet bureaucracy but the resultant lack of official recognition was amply compensated for by nationwide adoration for the bard whose tapes circulated in millions all across the country.
Only recently officially dismissed as bourgeois, jazz music was also making a strong comeback with two jazz clubs almost simultaneously opening in Moscow. Among the bands playing there was a professional jazz outfit just formed by the young and very gifted saxophone player Alexei Kozlov .
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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