Word: rodion
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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SHCHEDRIN: THE CARMEN BALLET (Melo-diya/Angel). Rodion Shchedrin, 35, the current Establishment favorite of Russia's younger generation of composers, wrote this ballet for his beautiful wife Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi Ballet's prima ballerina. Hearing the Toreador Song and the Changing of the Guard freely arranged for strings and 47 percussion instruments is pleasant for the first time, but no more. Shchedrin mistakes brashness for cleverness so often that familiarity with his work breeds boredom...
...even the most jaded ears, and this collection of arias is particularly affecting. While most of the composers (Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev) are familiar, the excerpts are less so. Among the most intriguing is from Not Love Alone, an opera about the love life on a collective farm by Rodion Shchedrin. The youngest composer represented on the album (and husband of Prima Ballerina Maya Plisetskaya), Shchedrin finds room for originality within conventional Soviet Realism-which means late, late, late Romanticism. However superficial, his melodies are refreshingly singable. Mezzo-Soprano Arkhipova renders all with intelligence and virtuosity...
...Andrei Antonovich Grechko, 63, Russia's First Deputy Defense Minister, was promoted to Defense Minister to replace Rodion Malinovsky, who died last month of cancer. His appointment abruptly ended speculation that the Kremlin, over army objections, was about to turn the defense ministry over to a civilian. Like Malinovsky, Grechko is a hardbitten, hard-drinking professional soldier who worked his way up through the ranks to become a marshal in the Red army. As Malinovsky's stand-in for the past ten years, he became proficient in the art of rocket rattling, in 1963 even claimed that "Soviet...
Died. Marshal Rodion Yakovlevich Malinovsky, 68, the Soviet Union's Minister of Defense since 1957; of cancer; in Moscow. Short, grizzled, gruff, Malinovsky looked like the original Russian bear-and played the part to perfection. As a heavy-fisted soldier, he took part in the World War II defense of Stalingrad, commanded the advance through Rumania and Hungary to Vienna, and finally Russia's "one-week war" against Japan. As a Communist, he was the perfect, unquestioning Party member, who survived all purges, obediently reined in the army when Khrushchev opted for fewer guns and more butter, then...
...with action made caution mandatory. But Moscow finally realized that it could no longer hope to retain loyalties in Eastern Europe by mere dictation. Russian forces began withdrawing from the satellites; by 1958, the 55,000 Red Army troops that had arrived in Rumania 14 years earlier under General Rodion Malinovsky were finally pulled out. By 1961, when the ideological debate between Moscow and Peking had escalated to raucous polemics, Rumania and the rest of Eastern Europe were ready to move. Rumania took the first step by stubbornly refusing to play the role assigned to it in COMECON...