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1969
             
…Composer Dmitry Shostakovich was now spending most of his time in hospital where his doctors were trying unsuccessfully to figure out the cause of the weakness in his legs and the right arm."
"Hardly a day goes by without these guys from the Kremlin hospital thinking up new treating methods but we are still where we were a year ago," Shostakovich complains in a letter to a friend. "The mere thought that I'm so incapacitated sends creeps running down my spine. I can't walk much, go up the steps and scale hillocks…"
But even bedridden as he was, the composer kept writing on…
"Yesterday I finished the clavier of a new thing. It's not an oratorio since there is no choir in there. There are two solo voices though, soprano and bass. Maybe I should call it a symphony?" Shostakovich muses in a letter he wrote on February 17. "I started thinking this over back in 1962, when I was arranging Mussorgsky's Four Songs and Dances of Death. I wanted to follow up on this and so I found some appropriately-themed Russian, French and Spanish poems. The music brought them all together in a four-part cycle about death and love…"
Finished with the 14th Symphony, Shostakovich was very much buoyed and happy about what he believed was his best music with everything he had done before only leading up to his life's masterpiece...
The 14th Symphony premiered in Leningrad on September 29 and was dedicated to the British composer Benjamin Britten.
In an outpouring of international recognition, the outstanding Russian pianist Emil Gilels becomes an honorary member of the Royal Music Academy in London, wins honorary professorship of the Lizst Conservatory in Budapest, wins a gold medal in Paris and is awarded Belgium's very prestigious Order of Leopold the First. His biggest award, however, was the love of his listeners who jam-packed the halls where he played and enthusiastically applauded their beloved performer…
The Borodin String Quartet is going from strength to strength. Already famous in Europe, they are now taking America by storm…
"This one is a truly unique outfit. The way they play and sound is absolutely second to none!" raved a critic in The New York Times.
The young Russian musicians are scoring high points with conductor Dmitry Kitayenko becoming a winner of the First International Music Competition in Berlin organized by the venerable Herbert von Karajan who says:
"Dmitry Kitayenko will make it real big, because he knows all the undercurrents of our extremely difficult profession…"
The 25 year-old Moscow conservatory graduate Vladimir Spivakov wins a major international competition in Montreal in a strong follow-up to his third-place showing at the Jacques Tibauld competition in Paris and the silver medal he had won participating in the Paganini contest in Genoa.
"Spivakov is the ultimate musician! The charming sound of his violin forever stays in one's memory," eulogizes a Canadian critic after Spivakov's triumphal performance…
In the German Democratic Republic, Friederich Lips, a virtuoso accordionist from the Moscow Gnessin Music College, bows out with the top award from the Harmonica Days festival astounding the jury and the audience with his mind-boggling technique.
Meanwhile, the young Tamara Sinyavskaya of the Bolshoi Opera wins the Grad Prix of an international competition at Varvier, Belgium…
"A voice this beautiful is very hard to find these days," goes a reviewer covering the competition. "This velvet contralto penetrates one's soul as the fragrance of a wonderful flower…"
All these young performers are someday to become internationally acclaimed musicians.
In Leningrad, a young multi-instrumentalist is wowing the public with his red-hot virtuosity, drive and inimitable talent. David Goloshchyokin fast becomes the talk of the town…
David Goloshchyokin is a living legend now making St.Petersburg the jazz capital of Russia and establishing a jazz philharmonic society there.
In 1969 they stop making 78 rpm records in Russia switching wholly to 33 rpm LPs…
It was on one those new disks that the popular actor and singer Mark Bernes records Yan Frenkel's Cranes - a song with almost a mystical connotation. The cranes are depicted here as the souls of the soldiers fallen in the already faraway World War Two. Bernes, who himself has fought in the war, loves the song and records it realizing his days are numbered… "This one's my last song, my testament," said the terminally ill singer…
Mark Bernes didn't live to see the release of his last record, but he knew all along that it would outlive its makers. Indeed, for millions of people the Cranes will forever be associated with the inimitable voice of Mark Bernes…
Composer Alexandra Pakhmutova and poet Nikolai Dobronravov come up with a new song they call Hope. It's hard to find any other lyrical song that is so widely popular in the country as this one! Not a single day goes by without Hope being repeatedly played on radio, television and in concerts. The popular singer Muslim Magomayev wins the Grand Prix singing the song during a music festival in Sopot, Poland.
Decades later, a popular Russian radio station of the same name took up the song's refrain as its signature tune …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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