Word: kirill
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SHOSTAKOVICH: SYMPHONY NO. 5 (Melodiya-Angel). The Fifth is Shostakovich's best-known work, part of the repertory of most major orchestras. In the U.S. it has been associated with Leonard Bernstein, who helped to popularize it and who has made a stunningly dramatic recording. Kiril Kondrashin and the Moscow Philharmonic are more lyrical and reflective, so that the first and third movements have special eloquence-emotional search and intellectual despair...
...Symphony made its triumphant debut in Moscow in 1956, Russian audiences were shocked to discover what the outside world had long acknowledged-that U.S. orchestras were the world's finest. Russian cultural circles began buzzing with talk of the "orchestra gap." One of the most outspoken critics was Kiril Kondrashin, then conductor with the Bolshoi opera, who bluntly declared that Russian orchestras had to shape up. Four years later, when Kondrashin was appointed conductor of the Moscow Philharmonic, he admitted that "the U.S. orchestra is the ideal I am working toward...
...Peter's-for a novelistic drama of great power and immediate concern. West's tale of the Russian who becomes Pope surmounts two obvious hazards when the papacy is a subject for fiction-that of scandalizing Catholics or boring those outside the Catholic faith. Pope Kiril is no bore and is perhaps the first fictional pontiff to pass the severe test the subject imposes on the fallibility of novelists.*West's novel can be read as exciting fiction by a notable craftsman (The Devil's Advocate) and for the documentary expertise West acquired as Vatican correspondent...
...Kiril Lakota was a Ukrainian, and at 50 he was the youngest and most obscure of the 85 cardinals who met in the Sistine Chapel to elect a new Pope. His very name had just become known in Rome, having been kept in petto by the dead Pontiff-as are currently the names of three cardinals in the breast of Pope John. Said Kiril to his brother princes: "I have spent the last 17 years in prison. If I have any rights among you. let it be that I speak for the lost ones, for those who walk in darkness...
Satanic Parody. As Pope, Kiril must confront, as did his predecessor, the specter of atheistic Communism. But he must do so in an unprecedented way, for he bears on his face, hands and back, the scars of Communist torture. His interrogator in a Siberian prison was Kamenev, who has become head of the Soviets. The Pope, in fact, is thus a failed product of (or triumphant escapee from) that satanic parody of the confessional-the brainwashing process wherein men confess to crimes they have not committed to men who have no power to absolve. Yet Pope and Commissar understand...