Word: rodion
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...clock on the morning of May 1, 1960, my telephone rang. I picked up the receiver, and the voice on the other end said, "Minister of Defense Marshal Rodion Malinovsky reporting." He went on to tell me that an American U-2 reconnaissance plane had crossed the border of Afghanistan into Soviet airspace and was flying toward Sverdlovsk. I replied that it was up to him to shoot down the plane by whatever means he could. Malinovsky said he'd already given the order, adding "If our antiaircraft units can just keep their eyes open and stop yawning long...
...think Bizet did it pretty well himself, so I said no. Then I met David. We got to talking about Prosper Mérimée's original Carmen story, which is tough as a documentary film. We decided to go about ten times as far as Rodion Shchedrin did in The Carmen Ballet that's being played to death nowadays. We wanted to really shock and mortify the opera crowd...
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...