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1964
             
In the spring the company of Milan's world-famous La Scala Opera was giving its first ever performances in Moscow where music buffs were scrambling to get in only to find out that the most of the tickets had already been distributed among Communist party functionaries and big-enterprise workers.
The Italians rolled out their big guns offering a string of time-tested operas by Verdi and Puccini. The Russian public was having the time of their life enjoying the singing by such previously unknown luminaries of bel canto as Mirella Freni, Fiorenzo Cassoto, Birgit Nielson, Bruno Prevedi and Luciano Pavarotti. During the closing night they all took part in a gala concert held at the Conservatory's Big Hall. Fiorenza Cassoto was also there…
In autumn, the Bolshoi Opera returned the visit performing in Milan. Some local critics were initially very skeptical about the Russians' singing ability and spoke about the specific nature of the Bolshoi's repertoire. The very first performance silenced the critics though stunning the local audience with the awesome beauty, magnitude and originality of the Russian productions and, most surprisingly, with the Russians' amazing singing. The critics lavished praise on the lead and backup singers alike and extolled the tightly knit performance of the Bolshoi orchestra and its unbelievably powerful choir. Prince Igor by Alexander Borodin, Sadko by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, War and Peace by Sergei Prokofyev and, above all, Boris Godunov by Modest Mussorgsky won standing ovation. During the closing night show the people applauded for a whole 30 minutes with the singers making a whopping 17 curtain calls!
Most of the performances had been prepared and were conducted by the Bolshoi's chief conductor Alexander Melik-Pashayev. An outstanding musician, he, like so many other Russian artists, was largely unknown in the West. The triumph in Milan made him famous in Europe and, shortly after, also in the United States where the American Academy awarded him a Grand Prix for recording Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov opera.
In Russia, the festival movement was on the go with artistic celebrities and aspiring performers scrambling to take part in the prestigious May Stars and Russian Winter events being held in Moscow…
Meanwhile, in Gorky, the city where the Russian festivals originally started out, they were holding the first Dmitry Shostakovich festival. Never before had the musical endeavor of this great Russian composer been presented so lavishly and diversely. Eager to breathe new vigor into the great composer whose progressing hand disease had severely minimized his stage presence, Mstislav Rostropovich, the main driving force behind the whole event, fancied to see Shostakovich conducting the orchestra himself. For the ever shy Shostakovich, however, managing a large team of people was a mission impossible and his first try in Gorky also became his last. During that memorable night, he was conducting his own concerto for cello and orchestra with the formidable Mstislav Rostropovich playing the lead part.
In 1964 Rostropovich won the Lenin Prize - the highest in Russia - for his excellent performance of a series of cello pieces by Soviet composers, including, of course, by his good friend Dmitry Shostakovich.
The composer Georgy Sviridov, already very popular on the strength of his Pathetic Oratorio, was now more into the folk-inspired tunes of his native and very musical Kursk region. He picked out the best songs he could find there, arranged them for choir throwing in some lavish and colorful orchestration all resulting in the awesome and inspiring Kursk Songs Cantata...
The premiere was a real celebration with choirs all across the land taking up the new composition and Alexander Yurlov's choir taking it to Paris, Rome and London.
The Sun of the Incas which the 35 year old Edison Denisov wrote for soprano and eleven instruments became a major premiere of the year. It gave Russian music a whole new dimension, let alone Denisov himself who had never before ventured so boldly outside the traditional musical format. The Sun of the Incas offered an absolutely incomprehensible combination of asceticism and colors galore, the laconic melodism of the ancient rites and the ravishing diversity of Nature's voices…
The Sun of the Incas gave a new twist to the Russian musical avant-garde and Edison Denisov shot to the very forefront of this trail-blazing movement becoming the darling of the West and bearing the full brunt of official displeasure at home…
The young Russian pianists were winning kudos performing at major international competitions with Yevgeny Mogilevsky winning gold at the Queen Elizabeth Festival in Brussels, Nikolai Petrov ringing in with a silver medal , and Vladimir Krainev becoming the far and away winner at the Vian da Mota competition in Lisbon, Portugal. The 20 year old Moscow Conservatory's student who, in the previous year, had won acclaim at a similar event in Leeds, Britain, wins the jurors' hearts with his larger-than-life talent and a combination of all stops-out virtuosity and poetic inspiration of the soul.
The 21-year-old Tamara Sinyavskaya becomes a lead singer at the Bolshoi becoming the youngest diva in the entire history of Russia's oldest music theater. Still a student, Sinyavskaya, using her amazingly beautiful voice and workaholic attitude, she took just a couple of months to learn several leading parts and was now fully in a position to aspire for a star-status at the Bolshoi.
Tamara Sinyavskaya still remains a jewel in the crown of the Bolshoi Opera company. Each time she walks out on stage is a real celebration for her numerous admirers.
In the same year the 22-year-old baritone from Azerbaijan, Muslim Magomayev - Tamara Sinyavskaya's husband-to-be - stunned Moscow first with some absolutely virtuosic performance of operatic arias and then moved on to sing pop songs. The success was absolutely deafening!
Muslim Magomayev quickly became a cult figure always having in tow a posse of adoring fans, most of them female, which could make any rock or movie star drool. He gave three concerts each day filling out huge spaces all across Russia with twice as more less lucky aficionados hanging out outside trying desperately to get in.
It's a pity that Magomayev's stage career proved so short-lived. The human voice is too fine an instrument to be abused so hard. By the early 1970 his stage visibility started subsiding fast and, shortly after, Magomayev stopped performing altogether. He still remains a living legend to a whole generation of Russians, a wonderful singer whose voice can make you laugh and it can make you cry …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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