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Kabalevsky operas

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Swanekj
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« on: March 20, 2013, 11:17:33 pm »

Anyone have any Kabalevsky operas?  The WWII operas were supposedly very popular.  Any opera about an Armored Train I'd like to hear.
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Gauk
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« Reply #1 on: March 21, 2013, 04:30:04 pm »

The whole of Colas Breugnon (the one with the famous overture) was released on CD by Olympia quite some time ago.
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Swanekj
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« Reply #2 on: March 21, 2013, 04:38:09 pm »

The whole of Colas Breugnon (the one with the famous overture) was released on CD by Olympia quite some time ago.
Ever heard anything of the others?
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cilgwyn
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« Reply #3 on: March 21, 2013, 06:49:13 pm »

I'd like to hear Colas Bregnon the opera (! ;D ) too! I seem to recall the reviews,I saw, of the cd set were quite positive!
I think it is possible that his opera 'The Taras Family' (hope I've got the title right!) was recorded in Soviet days. I'm sure I saw it in my old Russian Record Company/Collets catalogue lists,back in the days of Melodiya Lps. (How I used to relish perusing those,often,bulky mailing lists!) Of course,it may have been just an Overture or something,it's so long ago.If it was recorded,those Lps must still exist,presumably in the collections of some uk enthusiasts,too?  I also remember seeing a Gliere opera listed too. 'Shakh-Senem,I think!).
I wonder how old the recordings are,though? Having said that,the singing on those old soviet sets was usually very good,often superb & you can't beat that old authentic soviet era brass!  :) Mind you,they always got rubbished in the West! Unfairly,I thought! At any rate,these are the sort of obscure opera recordings I wish I'd bought now. But as a teenager,having only so much pocket money,I had to make some VERY tough decisions,believe me!! :( :(
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Elroel
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« Reply #4 on: March 22, 2013, 05:44:38 pm »

They told me that The Taras Family was indeed recorded and this recording was given on the radio in the early 1970s. I never heard the work, nor I ever saw a recording for that matter
His Colas Breugnon, his last opera, was somewhat outside many of his others works, not too much Socialist Realistic.

The sound quality of the Olympia set is quite good. There are also  a couple of beautiful voice in it.


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Neil McGowan
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« Reply #5 on: March 22, 2013, 07:08:32 pm »

I'm sure I saw it in my old Russian Record Company/Collets catalogue lists,back in the days of Melodiya Lps. (How I used to relish perusing those,often,bulky mailing lists!)

The materials from which the boxes themselves were made - particularly the glue, I think? - lent a peculiarly slavic odour to these sets :)  The old record department at Collets was somewhat notable in this respect :)

I wish Melodiya would realise the value they hold in their enormous back catalogue?  Even if they released them just as downloads, they'd be hugely valuable.

There is a peculiar guy in Kiev (whom I know personally) who operates under the name of Sir Walter Boot-Legge. His apartment is stacked from floor to ceiling with what used to be the back catalogue at Melodiya's branch in Kiev.  I believe he has a lot of it 'available'.  He speaks English :)
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cilgwyn
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« Reply #6 on: March 22, 2013, 08:18:36 pm »

Whew!!I remember the smell of that glue! :o ;D It was very strong,a bit musky in quality,but not unpleasant! Pure nostalgia now,of course! I never actually visited Collets,but the aroma from all those massed boxes must have been quite an experience!
Sir Walter Boot-Legge!! That's a classic! ;D
I notice that Melodiya have been reissuing some of their more 'interesting' stuff,recently. Svetlanov's Liadov recordings,for example. I used to have the Melodiya Lp with an appropriately mysterious looking forest on the front. I still think they are the finest interpretations I have ever heard. But that's just an opinion,of course!
With respect to pre-soviet opera,I noticed recently,that Rimsky Korsakov's opera 'The Tale of Tsar Saltan' (source of the marvellous orchestral suite) has yet to receive a modern stereo recording. Am I the only member here to find that fact quite shocking?! :o :(
Incidentally,a query for our East european members. Is it Liadov or Lyadov? I seem to encounter these different spellings when I 'google' his name! The Melodiya cd has Lyadov on the front. Since it's a Russian recording this must surely be correct?! However,a number of recordings refer to him as Liadov!
Hope I'm not making a fool of myself by asking this?!! :( ;D


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Neil McGowan
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« Reply #7 on: March 22, 2013, 08:46:51 pm »

Incidentally,a query for our East european members. Is it Liadov or Lyadov? I seem to encounter these different spellings when I 'google' his name!

There's no definitive answer to this question, in fact :))  The reason being that the process of transfer ("transliteration") from one alphabet to another is often a matter of taste - since the entire process is one of 'rough equivalents'.  Generally speaking, there's an increasing trend these days to using the so-called "Harvard" convention on transcription these days - it's just as good as any other, and it's based on sound logic, so I tend to go with it myself.

However, when there are established exceptions, I think it's generally best to go with them. These particularly occur when the composer or performer themselves had a preferred way they like to see their name in the Latin alphabet. For example, Rachmaninoff preffered those two final 'ffs' to a 'v', and he signed autographs on his many tours of the USA using the spelling "Rachmaninoff'. I believe that it would be remarkably presumptuous to contradict the composer himself in a case like this!  Even though that '-off' ending is nowadays considered an old-fashioned sort of spelling.


But the most numerous exceptions are cases where Russian (or USSR-era, or other Cyrillic-spelt...) composers had their music published abroad.  This was the case with Tchaikovsky, Kabalevsky, Medtner and many others.  The point being that the leading music-publishers of the day were GERMAN, and thus they spelt-out Tchaikovsky's name as it 'ought to look in German'.  Thus it needs a leading 'T' for him to avoid becoming 'Shaikovsky'.  The same is true of Medtner,  who has no 'd' at all in Russian - but his surname had a German counterpart, and thus it was used. Much of this was down to the Russian publisher Jurgenson, who set up these joint-publishing deals abroad - and himself used a Germanified spelling of his own surname :)

Of course there are no fixed rules here, and if you buy a disk of Swan Lake in France, you'll find that the composer is Monsieur Chaikoffski :))

Things get even more complex when the composer's name is in a non-Russian language that's been written out in Russian (sometimes wrongly!) - like Khachaturian, whose name is correctly spelt only in his native Armenian..  then muddled through Russian into an anglicised version. And also for Georgian, Uzbek, Tajik, and other composers whose countries don't use either Latin or Cyrillic.

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Gauk
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« Reply #8 on: March 22, 2013, 09:32:07 pm »

Tchaikovsky is another case in point where we know the composer's own preference. Yes to the initial "T", please.

Khachaturian is, I believe, correctly pronounced "Hack-a-toor-YAN", but you don't hear that on the radio.
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Elroel
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« Reply #9 on: March 22, 2013, 09:41:13 pm »

Some time ago one of the members would like to have the original name following the transliterated one. In the earlier days it was not easy to created cyrillic signs on our western keyboards. But nowadays it is very easy to 'copy and paste' from YT or from elsewhere.
May be we follow that example?
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Neil McGowan
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« Reply #10 on: March 23, 2013, 02:17:11 pm »

Some time ago one of the members would like to have the original name following the transliterated one. In the earlier days it was not easy to created cyrillic signs on our western keyboards. But nowadays it is very easy to 'copy and paste' from YT or from elsewhere.
May be we follow that example?

Although I would not insist on members having to do that here (!), it's worth being able to do this (cut/pasting from Wikipedia, for example).

If you enter the original cyrillic into a Google Search, it will often add new items to the results, from web pages created by Russian-speaking enthusiasts.  It may mean more to wade through, but often you can find music files, or notation files, which an ordinary latin-alphabet search might miss?  :)

Although there are Russian-dedicated search engines like Yandex,  Google now indexes Russian pages so comprehensively that you hardly need bother :)

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Swanekj
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« Reply #11 on: March 27, 2013, 10:01:30 pm »

I'd like to hear Colas Bregnon the opera (! ;D ) too! I seem to recall the reviews,I saw, of the cd set were quite positive!
I think it is possible that his opera 'The Taras Family' (hope I've got the title right!) was recorded in Soviet days. I'm sure I saw it in my old Russian Record Company/Collets catalogue lists,back in the days of Melodiya Lps. (How I used to relish perusing those,often,bulky mailing lists!) Of course,it may have been just an Overture or something,it's so long ago.If it was recorded,those Lps must still exist,presumably in the collections of some uk enthusiasts,too?  I also remember seeing a Gliere opera listed too. 'Shakh-Senem,I think!).
I wonder how old the recordings are,though? Having said that,the singing on those old soviet sets was usually very good,often superb & you can't beat that old authentic soviet era brass!  :) Mind you,they always got rubbished in the West! Unfairly,I thought! At any rate,these are the sort of obscure opera recordings I wish I'd bought now. But as a teenager,having only so much pocket money,I had to make some VERY tough decisions,believe me!! :( :(

Shahsanam. Overture to opera, at:  http://classical-music-online.net/en/production/39012.



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Toby Esterhase
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« Reply #12 on: January 16, 2019, 12:25:07 am »

On a movie ,IMHO Kabalevsky's film music is at height of Prokofiev and Shostakovich and needs of modern recording:
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/mp/9460447.0012.201?view=text;rgn=main
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guest224
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« Reply #13 on: January 16, 2019, 10:54:06 am »

The owner of Aquarius Classics ( http://aquarius-classic.ru ) has told me that he has an old recording of Kabalevsky's "The Master-Craftsman of Clamecy" (this is the first version of "Colas Breugnon") - among other old recordings of Russian operas - but is waiting to raise $450 per opera in order to release them commercially on CD.

It doesn't seem like a huge amount of money...
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