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1988
             
The deep-cutting reforms Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev launched in the mid-1980s had turned the country all around affecting all sections of the Soviet society. Russia was slowly regaining long-forgotten notions, traditions and values. In 1988 the country, which seemed to have forgotten everything it once knew about God, held nationwide celebrations marking 2000 years of Russian Christianity. New churches were being built and old Christian shrines, previously turned into warehouses by the Communist regime, were being given back to the faithful. The people, long forced away from everything that was religious, were suddenly waking up to church culture and music…
Anniversary gala performances were being held in the country's best concert venues with the main and, of course, the grandest, one taking place in the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow attended by Gorbachev himself all his high-powered associates…
The political climate resulting from a dramatic relaxation of tensions between the Cold War foes is brushing off on the cultural life with major confidence-building functions held on both sides of the Great Divide… One such cultural happening was the Soviet-American music festival held in Boston in March. It was organized by conductor, manager and a modern art connoisseur, Sarah Caldwell. She once apprenticed with the Boston Orchestra's famed Russian-born conductor Sergei Kusevitsky who instilled in her a very special interest in Russian music.
Attending the Boston festival was the veritable cream of modern Russian music, composers Rodion Shchedrin, Alfred Schnittke, Tikhon Khrennikov and other leading musicians. The event opened with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the world-acclaimed conductor Seiji Ozawa playing music from Sergei Prokofyev's ballet Romeo and Juliet …
Composer Sofya Gubaidulina, then a virtually unknown entity to America's concert-going public, becomes a major highlight of the Boston festival. The Boston Sunday Globe newspaper comes up with a big story headlined: "The West Wakes Up to Sofya Gubaidulina's Genius." Back in Russia, however, her music, just like everything that was unorthodox and talented, had only recently stopped being looked upon with hostile suspicion by the country's music bosses…
On a hot sunny day in July they were offering a very unusual presentation of Mikhail Glinka's opera Ivan Susanin, also known as A Life for the Czar, under the Kremlin walls in the Volga city of Gorky, now Nizhny Novgorod. The choice of the place was by no means coincidental because it was here, right next to the Ivan Tower of the city's medieval citadel, that the local merchant Kozma Minin started gathering a new national army in 1611 to drive out the Polish invaders from Moscow.
The unusual presentation by the Gorky Opera Theater attracted a great deal of interest with many opera lovers arriving from all around the country to see it…
The Bolshoi Theater came up with a double coup de force offering two premieres in a single year. One was the Golden Cockerel opera by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov coming out in May and the opera-ballet Mlada by the same author premiering in December. The last opera written by the 19th century Russian classic, the Golden Cockerel, a political satire, rarely appeared on stage quite understandably frowned on by Czars and Communist leaders alike…
Director Georgy Ansimov and conductor Yevgeny Svetlanov offer an absolutely dazzling presentation, which sells out the Bolshoi's giant hall for a whole year…
Mlada premiered in December. An opera on a semi-fantastic, semi-historical subject which had originally been offered to the members of the Balakireff circle for a collaborative effort in 1972, it was enthusiastically taken up by members of the so-called Russian Five, each one supposed to contribute an act all his own. The whole effort quickly fizzled, though, because the composers didn't like the tangled, semi-fantastic libretto. In the end it was Rimsky-Korsakov who single-handedly saw through that bungled collaboration writing the acts his friends were supposed to work on…
Unfortunately, Mlada never was a success neither during its author's life nor after his death in 1908. It hadn't been staged in Russia ever since 1923 and it was now the time for director Boris Pokrovsky and conductor Alaxander Lazarev to give it another try. They offered a colorful and stirring spectacle, which the Bolshoi company successfully played in Russia, and then took it on to Italy, the United States and Japan…
On January 22 there came the sad news of the death of the great Russian conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky. The man who had conducted the Leningrad Philharmonic's symphony orchestra for a staggering 50 years and made it one of the best such outfits in the whole world, Mravinsky offered absolutely inimitable interpretations of Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Beethoven and Prokofyev. The first-time performer of much of what had ever been written by Dmitry Shostakovich, he introduced the broad public to the music by one of the 20th century's greatest composers… Mravinsky's demise was writing an end to a whole era of Russian music…
A few months later, the Leningrad Philharmonic symphony orchestra elected a new conductor - the 50 year-old Yuri Temirkanov who previously led the orchestra of Leningrad's Kirov Opera and Ballet Theater, now Mariinsky. Temirkanov was replaced by the 38-year-old Valery Gergiyev who became the youngest man to lead the Mariinsky orchestra in the more than two century-old history of the world-famous theater.
Ostashkov, a tiny town on Lake Seliger in the very heart of Russia, was playing host to a music festival whose star-studded lineup of performers could easily make envious any big-time event organizer… Playing on a makeshift open-air wooden platform was pianist Mikhail Pletnev and the majestic Irina Arkhipova was singing with a choir under the huge dome of the newly-renovated local cathedral.
The Music Summer on Lake Seliger has since become traditional bringing together musicians from all across Russia. Hundreds of music buffs camp out on the shores of the scenic lake much to the satisfaction of the blood-hungry mosquitoes…
In Moscow they renovate and open to the public an old mansion on Novinsky Boulevard where the great Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin made his home at the very dawn of the 20th century…
The first national competition of organ players starts in Moscow, once a very hard to find profession largely because organs used to be very few and far between in Russia. But now that organ halls had opened in just about every big city and organ classes had appeared in conservatories, the people's interest in the "King of Instruments" had shot up notably in recent years…
Moscow, Leningrad and other big cities had already grown used to the traditional festivals of wind music where colorfully attired brass bands paraded down the cities' main streets…
The reigning queen of Russian pop, Alla Pugacheva, releases her first LP featuring only the songs she has written herself. As it turns out, the much-talented singer has long been writing music and lyrics using all kinds of stage names…
In the same year of 1988 Alla Pugacheva tries to launch in Moscow a Song Theater but in a poor country like ours, the idea quickly falls through…
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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