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1966
1967
             
Russia's prima ballerina Maya Plisetskaya dreams about dancing Carmen and asks her composer husband Rodion Shchedrin to write a ballet about the legendary Gypsy beauty. The request takes Shchedrin completely off guard. Bizet's version is famous all over the world, he argues, and who am I to try to compete with the great Frenchman? He eventually decides on a completely new arrangement, getting rid of the winds and concentrating solely on strings and drums.
The resultant Carmen-Suite is taken up by the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow where the Cuban choreographer Alicia Alonso takes just a few weeks to turn the elegant Plisetskaya into the shrewish and fiery hero of Bizet's timeless ballet. On April 20 the public enthusiastically applauds Shchedrin's new production.
Carmen-Suite soon becomes one of the best-loved ballets around taking the Russian theaters by storm. Moreover, its music is extensively taken up by many symphony orchestras across the land…
Composer Dmitry Shostakovich, still recuperating from a recent heart attack, is now taking it easy, neither drinking nor smoking and trying hard to keep calm.
"My doctors want me to give up composing altogether," he complains, "but I'd rather die than do that…"
Shostakovich is simultaneously writing several pieces, including a program of love songs to words by the great turn-of-the-century Russian poet Alexander Blok. The songs are being written for soprano voice, violin, cello and piano. The author wants the voice part to be sung by Galina Vishnevskaya, accompanied by her cello-playing husband Mstislav Rostropovich, with David Oistrakh on violin and the piano part to be played by Shostakovich himself. The rehearsals go just swell but in September Shostakovich breaks a leg and winds up in a hospital. He can neither play nor even attend the premiere as a listener.
Desperate, Shostakovich is still trying to make light of the whole thing:
"My right hand is not working, the right leg broke down a few years ago and I just broke my left one. Which makes 75 percent. All I have to do to be a complete cripple is to break my left hand and that'll be it…"
On October 23 the songs premiered in the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow with Moisei Vainberg on piano accompanied by a veritable dream team of Galina Vishnevskaya, Mstislav Rostropovich and David Oistrakh.
"This is the most sincere and elevated piece of music of the mid-century", raved a critic.
In the same year of 1967 several Conservatory students in Moscow teamed up forming what eventually became the famous Dmitry Shostakovich chamber orchestra playing all the 15 string quartets written by the great composer.
Moscow and Leningrad are playing host to some of the world's best orchestras with Pierre Boules and his BBC Orchestra introducing the Russian audiences to such heretofore little-known composers as Schoenberg, Berg, Weber and his very own compositions…
The symphony orchestra of the Santa Cecilia Academy in Rome conducted by Fernando Previtali brings in a whole program of music by Buzoni, Rossini, Verdi and other Italian classics.
Meanwhile, the Leningrad Philharmonic orchestra led by Yevgeny Mravinsky makes a triumphal tour of eleven Italian cities where the local critics heap praise on the performing excellence of the Russian musicians.
The Bolshoi diva Irina Arkhipova is in Milan rehearsing Modest Mussorgsky's Khovanshchina opera being staged by the world-famous La Scala Opera and wowing the connoisseurs of bel canto with her inimitable voice…
Back in Moscow, Arkhipova receives a letter from La Scala director Antonio Giringhelli:
"Dear Signora Arkhipova , thank You so much for Your participation on our production of Khovanshchnia. Your voice is absolutely unforgettable. I look forward to seeing You with us again…"
The young baritone Yuri Mazurok wins the first prize at the prestigious singers competition in Montreal and is immediately invited to join the company of the country's venerable Bolshoi Opera. For three decades his voice graces a constellation of classical Russian, Italian and French operas…
Another very lucky acquisition for the Bolshoi was the tenor Vladimir Atlantov, the winner of the 1966 Tchaikovsky international competition in Moscow. The formidable Sergei Lemeshev himself, the longtime occupant of this country's "best tenor" slot, happily tipped his hat to Atlantov's larger than life voice.
"The beauty, power and expressiveness of Atlantov's voice brings him up to par with the very best Italian tenors," Lemeshev said of his young colleague.
The Fast-Moving Time film hits the screens - the ultimate tribute to the inhumanely hard and almost free constructive effort bent by the first builders of a new Soviet society. And still there is something amazingly attractive there, the wide-eyed romanticism backed up by the contagious and very uplifting music by Georgy Sviridov.
Sviridov's music soon transcends the purely film format becoming for many years a popular suite and a signature tune for the prime-time Soviet-era news program Vremya.
Another movie with catchy tunes to come out that year was Leonid Gaidai's action-packed comedy The Prisoner of the Caucasus. The music was written by Alexander Zatsepin who contributed his tunes to a whopping 70 films!
The year 1967 sees the first concert in Sverdlovsk by the now popular singer-songwriter Alexander Dolsky. A recent graduate of the Urals Polytechnic where he had already established himself as a guitarist, Alexander is now with the Sverdlovsk Philharmonic Society and the darling of the local intellectual community. He is already trying his hand as a singer-songwriter and each his song provides a charmingly peaceful glimpse of Russia, a country which is all about bitterness and hope…
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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