Word: shchedrin
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...intermission, actors, dancers and musicians sought out the opinion of Rodion Shchedrin, the U.S.S.R.'s best known composer of modern music. He declared that he had tried to talk his friend Voznesensky out of getting involved with something as vulgar as a rock opera. Shchedrin, who is chairman of the powerful Russian Composers Union, then explained he had listened to a tape of the music. His verdict: "I fell in love with it." Soviet cultural bureaucrats were not as enthusiastic. They excised musical numbers that they regarded as too religious before giving permission for last week's performance...
...lavish productions and virtuoso dancing. But to dance buffs, the current season has been lackluster, relying heavily on stock repertory and a dwindling pool of leading dancers. The most eagerly anticipated new production, Plisetskaya's The Sea Gull, which she performed to music composed by her husband, Rodion Shchedrin, evoked the atmosphere of Chekhov's play in stylized vignettes but contained little real dancing...
...meaning could be made intelligible to Stalin, or to anyone else, was only a comforting illusion. Stalin, like all Russia's other tyrants, held an attitude toward the arts that was best summed up by a bureaucrat in a story by the 19th century satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin: "What I do not understand is dangerous for the state...
...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...