Zach Top Bolshoi: Best Of Melodiya [Various] [Melodiya: MELCD 1002164]

Firma Melodiya presents a unique set of recordings by soloists of the USSR Bolshoi Theatre – outstanding singers who performed on the main stage of this country during 1945 to 1990. They call it the golden age of the Bolshoi not for nothing. The first music theatre of the country attracted undiverted attention of not just millions of spectators and listeners (getting a ticket to the Bolshoi was almost an impracticable task for a "common Soviet citizen"). The supreme leadership of the Soviet Union watched the life of the theatre as closely as real music lovers did. Nearly all the premieres took place under the sign of "special responsibility". The theatre recruited the best artistic forces from all over the country, and in the post-war period there still were those who got their education and started their careers even before the revolution keeping the continuity of the old tradition of the Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. Galina Vishnevskaya, Irina Arkhipova, Elena Obraztsova, Tamara Sinyavskaya, Sergey Lemeshev, Ivan Kozlovsky, Vladimir Atlantov, Alexander Pirogov, Mark Reizen, Evgeny Nesterenko are just some of 30 soloists featured in this set. They are accompanied by the Bolshoi Orchestra lead by various conductors such as Nikolai Golovanov, Samuil Samosud, Alexander Melik-Pashayev, Evgeny Svetlanov, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, Yuri Fayer, Mark Ermler, Alexander Lazarev and others. Each of them made a valuable contribution to the treasury of Russian music culture of the 20th century. The set includes fragments from Russian classical opera and ballet repertoire of the 19th and 20th centuries, and some of the most popular foreign operas and ballets staged at the Bolshoi.