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1989
             
Moscow plays host to an Orthodox music festival - the first time religious music is offered in such a large scale and diversity since the 1917 socialist revolution. The program also includes medieval chants originally written in unorthodox musical notation and only recently figured out by Russian musicologists…
The audience enjoys long-since-forgotten church music by Tchaikovsky, Rakhmaninoff and other Russian classics, and music by composers who wrote exclusively for the church and whose names say very little to the concert-going public…
16 choirs, church and secular alike, are taking part in the festival, but the church choirs draw maximum attention from the audience packing the Conservatory Big Hall…
The young conductor Valery Gergiyev who has only recently been appointed chief conductor of Leningrad's famous Kirov Theater, now Mariinsky, holds this country's first Modest Mussorgsky festival adding the unfinished comic opera The Fair at Sorochinsk and a new rendition of Boris Godunov to the Khovanshchina opera already on the theater's bill. This time round the theater turns to Mussorgsky's original score and not the version done by his friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. Valery Gergiyev also makes use of the dramatization the famed movie director Andrei Tarkovsky once did at London's Covent Garden theater.
In 1989 the traditional December Nights festival Svyatoslav Richter annually holds on the premises of the Pushkin Fine Arts Museum in Moscow, is dedicated to the centennial birthday of the outstanding Russian poet and novelist Boris Pasternak.
Few people know that, as a young man, Pasternak wanted to become a composer and, being a great fan of Skryabin, he wrote his own pieces, which were filled with expression and mystery…
The music written by Boris Pasternak and his favorite authors highlights the 1989 December Nights festival…
Another music festival to start in Moscow in the spring is called The Alternative appropriately offering a selection of non-traditional music played on equally unorthodox instruments, from African drums to an alarm clock. As it turns out, however, you can extract some very unusual sounds also from such classical instruments as the violin and piano…
Vladimir Spivakov and his namesake Vladimir Fedoseyev win the much-coveted State Prize…
Violin-playing conductor Vladimir Spivakov, leads the phenomenally successful Virtuosos of Moscow chamber orchestra he has founded. The Virtuosos are admired by all, even those who are not very much into classical music…
Vladimir Fedoseyev represents a completely different, academic style, heading the Radio and television Big Symphony Orchestra. Using his penchant for Russian music, Fedoseyev becomes the first performer of many symphonies written by the leading Russian composer Georgy Sviridov.
Russian singers make their debut in a BBC-sponsored international competition in Britain. The 27 year-old Siberian Dmitry Khvorostovsky wins the main prize and the "world's best singer" title to stick with him until the next such competition starts a year later. Khvorostovsky's phenomenal performance of classical baritone arias wins him the title of the best baritone of the new generation"…
Khvorostovsky's triumphal performance in Britain was the beginning of a head spinning career. Later than same year he made his debut at Covent Garden in London and went on to sing in Paris, Berlin, Chicago and Salzburg…
In February the Culture Fund led by the prominent historian Dmitry Likhachev and Soviet First Lady Raisa Gorbacheva, launches the New Names music program initiated by the very talented Ivetta Voronova. The new program was on the lookout for young talented musicians, artists and poets giving them a chance to study with the best teachers, in the best colleges and perform on the country's best stages.
Getting the whole project off the ground, Ivetta Voronova had very little idea about the scope the program would eventually take. A mere year later, more than 300 musically endowed youngsters were already taking part performing for Pope John Paul II and patriarch of Moscow and All Russia Alexy II, in the Palace of Nations in Paris and Carnegie Hall in New York, applauded by the British Queen and the Spanish King, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich and actor Jean-Paul Belmondo…
Many of those first participants in the New Names program have since become big names in world music winning many a prestigious international competition…
The Aquarium band, led by the widely-acclaimed singer and songwriter Boris Grebenshchikov, tops the Russian charts. The guitar-strumming Grebenshchikov, or simply B.G, usually sings his songs in his trade-mark estheticism-heavy and public-challenging mannerisms.
At one moment B.G. starts to believe that he can have the whole world under his feet. To flesh out his ambitions dreams, he crosses the Atlantic to conquer the United States. Eventually realizing his inherently Russian roots, he gets back only to see that he is no longer the King here…
In Leningrad, a little young girl with a big and penetrating voice, is making a big splash walking the fine line separating folk country and beat music. Marina Kapuro and her charmingly naive songs quickly catch on with the people …
 
THE RUSSIAN MUSICAL HIGHLIGHTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY is prepared for you by Olga Fyodorova.


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