Word: vishnevskaya
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GALINA by Galina Vishnevskaya Translated by Guy Daniels Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 519 pages...
...decades, Galina Vishnevskaya reigned supreme at the Bolshoi Theater. No other soprano could match her sumptuous voice and dramatic presence or challenge her vibrant interpretations of Russian opera...
...that was before 1969, when she and her husband, Cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, offered sanctuary to the dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Many Soviet musicians joined in the official chorus denouncing Solzhenitsyn; the couple remained unyielding in his defense. As a result, Vishnevskaya and Rostropovich found that their concert and recording dates had been canceled by the Soviet authorities. After these two celebrated Soviet performers had emigrated to the West in desperation, their names were systematically expunged from the annals of Russian music...
Once in exile and facing the prospect of flagging vocal powers, Vishnevskaya, 58, turned to writing her autobiography with the same fevered intensity she invested in her operatic roles. These are no ghostwritten and-then-I-sang memoirs. Not since Dmitri Shostakovich's posthumously published confessional Testimony has a musician so convincingly portrayed a totalitarian state that spawns great artists, then despises the art they go on to produce...
Shostakovich: Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (Soprano Galina Vishnevskaya, Tenor Nicolai Gedda, Bass Dimiter Petkov, Ambrosian Opera Chorus, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Mstislav Rostropovich conductor, Angel; 3 LPs). Soviet critics thought they heard a masterpiece when this, Shostakovich's second opera, was premiered in 1934. Then Stalin walked out of a performance and they listened again. This time they heard "din, gnash and screech" (Pravda). The work was withdrawn, and Shostakovich pursued more orthodox ways. A sanitized version, unveiled in 1963, found its way to the West on records, but this is the first recording of the original score. Harsh, erotic...