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1978
             
20 years after its inception in 1958, the Tchaikovsky International Competition was now an internationally-acclaimed event with Van Clibern, John Ogdon, Viktor Tretyakov, Gidon Kramer, David Geringas, Yelena Obraztsova and other winners enjoying much-earned respect all around the world…
Nearly 300 young musicians from 37 countries taking part in the 1978 competition, already the sixth since 1958, were traditionally competing in four categories: piano, violin, cello and vocal.
Moscow Conservatory student Mikhail Pletnev was the event's biggest highlight his poetically inspired renditions of Tchaikovsky coming as a real revelation…
On January 24, the Bolshoi Opera was presenting a new version of Othello by Giuseppe Verdi. The new production was prepared by Yevgeny Svetlanov, who had long quit the Bolshoi orchestra. The result of his collaboration with the artistic director Boris Pokrovsky and stage designer Valery Levental was absolutely stunning…
Each tiniest detail, from the overall stage presence to that of the choir singers, was painstakingly thought out. The orchestra played with clockwork precision and the singers' choice was equally impeccable, with Vladimir Atlantov and Tamara Milashkina offering an absolutely inimitable presentation of the opera's two main characters…
The new production drew rave reviews as the main cultural highlight of the year…
In Leningrad, composer Andrei Petrov was putting the finishing touches to the biggest concerto he had ever written. He called it a symphonic opera. Built around the image of Russia's best-loved poet, Alexander Pushkin, the symphony featured his poems, historical chronicles and also Russian folk songs people sung back in the early-19th century in places frequented by the greatest verse-master this country has ever had…
On June 28, the symphonic opera, aptly titled Pushkin, premiered in Leningrad's sprawling Oktyabr concert hall with Yuri Temirkanov directing the city's best orchestra and choir.
Andrei Petrov then added several more episodes to the score resulting in a whole new ballet of the same name that was successfully staged by Leningrad's famous Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater, now Mariinsky…
On September 18 Dmitry Shostakovich's opera The Gamblers finally premiered in the Big Hall of the Leningrad Philharmonic - a much-awaited event the great composer never lived to see…
Shostakovich started writing this comic opera at a very inopportune time. The year was 1942, the very height of World War II. Shostakovich was then living in Kuibyshev, now Samara. One day, sifting through a book of stories by Nikolai Gogol who was his favorite writer, Shostakovich became so engulfed reading a comedy about card-playing gamblers that he decided to start writing an opera right away without changing a single word of Gogol's prose.
Inspired, Shostakovich worked day and night only to realize that if done the way it was originally intended, the opera would last forever… With the score almost finished, he put it away denoting it as Opus N69. It was only after the composer's death that the score was eventually found in his family archives and conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky finally played it in concert...
In Moscow, composer Aram Khachaturian was preparing to mark his 75th birthday. BBC Television made a big film about him and in Latin America they published a hefty volume highlighting the life's work of one of the 20th century's greatest composers.
In Moscow, anniversary celebrations were scheduled to start off early in June, but, on May 1, Aram Khachaturian suddenly died…
People turned out in thousands at the Conservatory Big Hall in Moscow where Khachaturian's body lay in state before being flown to Yerevan. Aram Khachaturian always wanted to be buried in his native Armenia…
Commissioned by Paris' Grand Opera theater, composer Alfred Schnittke had made a special rendition of Pyotr Tchaikovsky opera The Queen of Spades, adding a number of episodes to bring the plot closer to Alexander Pushkin's original story. Gennady Rozhdestvensky was already rehearsing the opera when, just before his scheduled departure for Paris, the Communist party mouthpiece, the Pravda, published an article signed by the Bolshoi Theater's chief conductor Algis Zhurajtis, where Schnittke and Rozhdestvensky were accused of encroaching upon what the newspaper said was a "timeless monument of national culture."
If Josef Stalin were still alive, an article like this could mean almost certain incarceration, banishment or even death for the accused, but in 1978 Schnittke and Rozhdestvensky only saw their exit visas cancelled meaning that they would also have to kiss goodbye to a scheduled premiere at the Grand Opera…
Whom the Soviet authorities really liked, however, was Boris Alexandrov, the longtime leader of the Army Song and Dance Ensemble his father, Alexander Alexandrov, set up 30 years before… In April the 73-year-old author of many popular marching songs is awarded the country's highest Lenin Prize…
In January, the newly-formed Cadence jazz band make their first performances in Moscow. The overall sound of the band, formed and led by composer and trumpet-player Herman Lukyanov, reminds of that of a big band pared down to just six or seven instruments with richly-textured polyphony and the instrument groups even playing against each other…
Almost overnight, Cadence becomes the darling of Russia's jazz-going community…
The Three Musketeers musical series makes a very strong premiere with people all across the nations singing along with the catchy songs written by the popular composer Maxim Dunayevsky …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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