Word: aram
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Ministry of Culture's Sovetskaya Kultura grumbled that Bernstein was "violating all traditions" and "looked somehow conceited." Yet it was only a squeak, lost among the cheers. In five concerts last week, Bernstein took Moscow by storm. Composer Aram Khachaturian rushed to pump Bernstein's hand after performances, bubbled over with rave reviews in the government's official organ, Izvestia, and added special praise for Bernstein's Symphony No. 2 ("Age of Anxiety"). Said another top Russian composer, Dmitry Kabalevsky, after hearing Bernstein's rendition of Shostakovich's Fifth Symphony: "Never have I heard...
...every conscientious Soviet composer knows (or at least has been clearly told), music stood still 50 years ago. Even the best of them-Dmitry Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian and the late Sergei Prokofiev-learned that lesson. In 1948, the Central Committee of the Communist Party accused them of representing "the formalist perversions and anti-democratic tendencies in music. The music savors of the present-day modernist bourgeois music of Europe and America, which reflects the decay of bourgeois culture." Last week the Central Committee took another look at the nation's three ranking modern composers and decided that none...
Onstage after the encore (Samuel Barber's Adagio for String Orchestra) marched three flower-bearing Soviet musicians: Composer Aram Khachaturian, Pianist Emil Gilels, Conductor Alexander Gauk. Khachaturian spoke Russia's praise for the orchestra. "Bolshoye, bolshoye spasibo [Great, great thanks]," returned Conductor Ormandy amid thunderous applause. And even after the players filed out, hundreds of spectators stayed in their seats, still applauding and crying, "Not enough! Not enough...
...Russians regard as their best, dubbed Van "a genius -a word I do not use lightly about performers." In tears of emotion Pianist Emil Gilels grabbed Van as he came off the stage after playing Rachmaninoff's Third Concerto, bussed him soundly on both cheeks. To Composer Aram Khachaturian, Van was "better than Rachmaninoff; you find a virtuoso like this only once or twice in a century." France's Marquis de Gontaut-Biron, a frequent judge of piano contests, found that Van had "almost the technique of Horowitz during his prime, and he has everything Horowitz always lacked...
...critics for the lack of imagination and heaviness of its scattered newer works. Back home, Russian choreographers petitioned the Ministry of Culture for a freer hand, and surprisingly, the Ministry agreed that "the many-sided variety of Soviet life is insufficiently reflected in ballet." Spartacus, music by Aram Khachaturian and choreography by Igor Moiseyev, scarcely intends to hold the mirror up to Soviet life, but it opens the window on a gaudy, gamy world rarely dreamed of by Moscow audiences...