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1974
             
In Moscow, the Bolshoi Theater takes up, for the first time, Sergei Prokofyev's The Gambler which the composer wrote when he was only 24. The young conductor Alexander Lazarev did a great job selecting the right musicians who offered a textbook performance of Prokofyev's very complicated score…
Overseeing the whole production was the formidable Boris Pokrovsky who thus described the opera's underlying idea:
"The roulette, the gamble and quick enrichment devour everything that is human in man who inevitably turns into a gambler and dies - first morally and then physically too…"
The new production won glowing reviews from everywhere…
Completing his work on The Gambler at the Bolshoi, Boris Pokrovsky busied himself staging Dmitry Shostakovich's early opera The Nose at the Chamber Musical Theater he had just set up in Moscow. The famed conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky was invited to musically supervise the new work and he certainly lived up to expectations, expertly underscoring the opera's satirical nature...
Braving his incapacitation, Dmitry Shostakovich kept coming to the rehearsals, visibly enjoying the production and the singers, especially Eduard Akimov who played Major Kovalev, the man who loses his nose and is oblivious of the fact that his body part is already roaming St.Petersburg resplendent in a military overcoat...
On September 12, the Chamber Musical Theater was abuzz just like it always is before major premieres. The company had every reason to be jittery because it was the second attempt in 44 years to stage the opera, once officially dismissed and viciously criticized as a complete failure…
When the final chords had died out, the audience exploded with tumultuous applause, which lasted for a full half-hour or even more. Excited and tousled, Shostakovich struggled his way on stage and, without even smiling once, kept bowing to his cheering crowd…
Three months later, on December 23, Shostakovich saw the premiere at Leningrad Philharmonic's Small Hall of his new vocal suite to the poems by the great Renaissance painter, musician and scholar, Michelangelo Buonarotti. The composer had written it expressly for the young bass singer Yevgeny Nesterenko.
"The Suite impressed me right away with the sheer magnitude of its music where the author, like in his will, asserts his heartfelt love for what he has believed in all his life," wrote the singer. " The truth and injustice, love and ire with human Creativity hovering magnificently over it all…"
It'd been two years since the composer Alfred Schnittke showed Gennady Rozhdestvensky the score of his first symphony. Deeply impressed, Rozhdestvensky decided to play it with the Moscow Radio's Big Symphony Orchestra, which he had been running for more than a decade. His more cautious colleagues warned him against collaborating with someone who was dismissed by the Soviet Composers' Union as an avant-gardist which means his music was bad and should neither be played in public nor recorded for radio."
Rozhdestvensky kept knocking on all doors trying to prove something, but his protestations were falling on deaf ears. Even worse, the cultural big shots were getting increasingly suspicious of the composer who refused to tow the party line… Realizing that the chances for Schnittke's symphony to be played in Moscow were nil, Rozhdestvensky goes down to the Volga city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod, some 300 kilometers away from the capital. Long off limits to foreigners, Gorky was famous for its love for anything that was unorthodox and new. And so, on February 9, the city symphony orchestra led by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, offered the very first performance to local and not so local music buffs packing the hall of Gorky's medieval Kremlin citadel.
A huge team of music buffs had come down from the capital much to the dissatisfaction of the local KGB secret police that kept a close eye on everyone attending the concert...
After the premier in Gorky, Gennady Rozhdestvensky fell out of favor with the Radio Committee chairman using every opportunity to dress down the overly independent conductor. After one such showdown, Rozhdestvensky quit his job as the chief conductor of the Moscow Radio's Big Symphony Orchestra and was immediately replaced by Vladimir Fedoseyev, who then led an orchestra of Russian folk instruments. Incensed by the appointment, many musicians left the orchestra, which spent the following few years playing to nearly empty halls…
The year 1974 was a very bad one for Russian culture. In the summer the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and his wife, Galina Vishnevskaya, of the Bolshoi Opera fame, were forced into emigration by official harassment after they invited the dissident author Alexander Solzhenitsyn to live at their country house. Shortly before leaving for the West, the couple gave a farewell concert at the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow. The management had to call in mounted police to control the huge crowd of admirers who had managed to get in…
On September 24 there came the sad news of the death in Amsterdam of the great Russian violinist David Oistrakh who didn't live days to celebrate his 66th birthday. An honorary member of the London, Rome, Berlin and Boston music academies, Oistrakh is by far and without a doubt the best violinist Russia and the whole world have ever had...
In June, more than 200 young musicians from 30 countries were in Moscow taking part in the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition which this time was less representative compared to earlier years. First prizes were only awarded in two disciplines out of four, with pianist Yevgeny Gavrilov being the biggest and only highlight of the whole event. Shortly after, he emigrated to the West and his name, just like those of all other emigrants, was deleted from the musical reference books and his recordings removed from the radio archives...
During the 5th National competition of pop music, a young band from the Urals sweeps all the top awards. The Ariel band plays very tasteful and imaginative arrangements of Russian folk tunes…
And in Sopot, Poland, the Soviet pop singer Sofiya Rotaru bows out with the Grand Prix awarded her for her brilliant performance of songs written by composers Yevgeny Martynov and David Tukhmanov. Tender and beautiful, these songs are still popular in Russia and the other former Soviet republics…
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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