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1976
1977
             
In Moscow, conductor Yuri Temirkanov, artistic director Boris Pokrovsky and set designer Valery Levental are working at the Bolshoi Theater staging Rodion Shchedrin's newly-written opera, The Dead Souls, after an eponymous novel by the great 19th century Russian author Nikolai Gogol. The three make the best of the novel's bubbling satire adding their vision to the all-time classic…
…The stage is divided into two tiers. The lower one is teeming with hordes of small-time money-hungry little men and women working flat out to make it big. Slowly floating over them is a grand vista of Russian plains stretching forever with their sun-drenched glades and birch-tree groves…
There are no strings at all in Shchedrin's score, their part is filled by the Moscow Chamber Choir. In the opera's folklore-tinged overture and finale, the choir sings Russian folk songs.
Rodion Shchedrin's opera The Dead Souls is possibly the best thing the Bolshoi Opera has done in the past fifty years. The following year Yuri Temirkanov followed up on the Bolshoi's success staging the opera at Leningrad's Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater he led.
The composer Alfred Schnittke, officially criticized for his allegedly formalist leanings, takes up the tried and true genre of Concerto Grosso. The result is a fairly democratic and comprehendible piece, which gives him his first chance of a lifetime to unveil it at the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow. The premiere plays to a full house of Schnittke admirers, most of them youngsters…
Alfred Schnittke wrote his Concerto Grosso for two lead violins and a chamber orchestra expressly for his good friends, Gidon Kramer and his wife Tatyana Grindenko. The result was an absolutely textbook performance to the strains of the Lithuanian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Sauljus Sondetskis…
Shortly after the death of Dmitry Shostakovich, they found in his papers the scores of his early compositions, which hadn't been played in public for many decades. The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky gave that long-forgotten music a new lease on life. One such born-again compositions was the overture to the opera Poor Columbus written by the German composer Erwin Dressel. In 1929 Leningrad's Maly Opera Theater undertook to stage Dressel's work but it so happened that the overture got lost somewhere along the way and Dmitry Shostakovich was commissioned to write the missing part…
Gennady Rozhdestvensky and his orchestra play Poor Columbus in concerts and record the soundtrack for The New Babylon movie Shostakovich wrote in that very same year of 1929. It was a silent movie, provided, for the first time, with a frame-per-frame score to be played by house orchestras. The experiment fell through because the cinema orchestras just couldn't play Shostakovich's music right. Rozhdestvensky's orchestra could giving full credit to the young composer's larger-than-life talent…
The famous German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Diskau was making his first tour of Russia partnering on stage with the great pianist Svyatoslav Richter. Music lovers in Moscow and in Leningrad were listening with bated breath to the astounding duo taking them to the fairy tale world of Schubert, Wolf and Brahms…
In the old Russian town of Vladimir Moscow Conservatory graduates set up a new chamber orchestra they call Musica Viva…
Several years later it was already one of the country's foremost chamber orchestras led by cellist, pianist and conductor Alexander Rudin. Each year Musica Viva held their own festival in Moscow great players from all around the world felt honored to join in…
In Moscow a brilliant performer and music enthusiast, Mark Pekarsky, forms a one-of-a-kind all-percussion band. Playing virtually every percussion instrument imaginable, Mark Pekarsky had, over the years, amassed a huge collection of drums from all times and countries, and many of these instruments feature extensively in the new ensemble's repertoire…
The band plays a number of pieces written with exactly its sound in mind, including Vyacheslav Artyomov's Totem widely hailed as the beginning of a new era in percussion…
In Moscow, professional folk choirs and ensembles from around the country showcase their skills. The overall impression leaves much to be desired though, replacing the genuinely folk tunes by modern pseudo-folklore imitations. Also gone is the inimitable sound and performing manner characteristic of Russia's many regions, all replaced by some generalized performing manner which is only vaguely reminiscent of the truly Russian folk idiom...
The only high points of the whole event was the Northern Choir hailing from the city of Archangel and led by Nina Meshko, a major authority on Russian folklore, and the Don Cossack Ensemble led by Nina Meshko's onetime student, Anatoly Kvasov…
By the late-1970s Russia already had a nationwide system of colleges training folk choirmasters and the number of first-class ensembles was going up fast…
Eldar Ryazanov turns out his Office Romance lyrical comedy. The songs written expressly for the film by the famous Leningrad-based composer Andrei Petrov give the movie an absolutely inimitable sound and, more than 20 years on, these wonderful songs are still very popular in Russia…
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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