| Moscow Chamber Orchestra | |
|---|---|
| Orchestra | |
| Founded | 1955 |
| Principal conductor | Alexei Utkin |
The Moscow Chamber Orchestra (MCO) is a chamber orchestra run under the auspices of the Moscow Philharmonia, a state-run enterprise, formerly under the patronage of the Ministry of Culture (Soviet Union) and now, Ministry of Culture of Russian Federation.
The MCO has performed throughout Russia and other East European countries. The orchestra was founded in 1955 by Rudolf Barshai. The MCO has since played in over eighty nations and played several million live concert concerts worldwide.
Rudolf Barshai, a founding member of Borodin Quartet, left the Quartet to pursue his conducting ambitions. He assembled young, talented musicians and soon the first Chamber Orchestra in the former USSR had its inaugural concert in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory on April 2, 1956. The Orchestra debuted at the Bath Festival organized in England in 1962. [1]
The Moscow Chamber Orchestra became the most traveled classical music ensemble in the former Soviet Union and toured the world from Eastern Europe to Canada and the United States and from Japan to South America.
The MCO performed 18th-century music by composers such as Mozart and Haydn, and contemporary music: its recording of Mozart's symphonies was the first to observe all the notated repeats. [2]
Many composers dedicated their compositions to the Moscow Chamber Orchestra, such as Dmitri Shostakovich, Revol Bunin, Mieczysław Weinberg, Boris Tchaikovsky and many others. The Orchestra performed many world-premiers of contemporary compositions, such as Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No.14, in Leningrad, on September 29, 1969. [1]
World-famous musicians performed and recorded with the Orchestra: Yehudi Menuhin, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh, Emil Gilels, Leonid Kogan, Malcolm Frager, to name a few. Following Barshai’s emigration to the West in 1977, Igor Semyonovich Bezrodny (Russian : Игорь Семёнович Безродный) was appointed a new conductor and an artistic director of the Orchestra. He led the Orchestra until 1981. For the next 10 years Moscow Chamber Orchestra was led by Victor Tretiakov, then Andrei Korsakov.
Constantin Orbelian was appointed a new conductor in 1991; he was succeeded by Alexei Utkin (Russian : Алексей Уткин), in 2010.[ citation needed ]
| International | |
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| Artists | |
Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Soviet-era Russian composer and pianist who became internationally known after the premiere of his First Symphony in 1926 and thereafter was regarded as a major composer.
David Fyodorovich Oistrakh was a Soviet Russian violinist, violist, and conductor. He was also Professor at the Moscow Conservatory, People's Artist of the USSR (1953), and Laureate of the Lenin Prize (1960).
Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 8 in C minor, Op. 110, was written in three days.
Gennady Nikolayevich Rozhdestvensky, CBE was a Soviet and Russian conductor, pianist, composer and pedagogue.
The Borodin Quartet is a string quartet that was founded in 1945 in the then Soviet Union. It is one of the world's longest-lasting string quartets, having marked its 70th-anniversary season in 2015.
David Geringas is a Lithuanian cellist and conductor who studied under Mstislav Rostropovich. In 1970 he won the gold medal at the International Tchaikovsky Competition. He also plays the baryton, a rare instrument associated with music of Joseph Haydn.
Dmitri Nikolaevich Smirnov was a Russian-British composer and academic teacher, who also published as Dmitri N. Smirnov and D. Smirnov-Sadovsky. He wrote operas, symphonies, string quartets and other chamber music, and vocal music from song to oratorio. Many of his works were inspired by the art of William Blake.
Dmitri Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 10 in A-flat major, Op. 118, was composed from 9 to 20 July 1964. It was premiered by the Beethoven Quartet in Moscow and is dedicated to composer Mieczysław (Moisei) Weinberg, a close friend of Shostakovich. It has been described as cultivating the uncertain mood of his earlier Stalin-era quartets, as well as foreshadowing the austerity and emotional distance of his later works. The quartet typified the preference for chamber music over large scale works, such as symphonies, that characterised his late period. According to musicologist Richard Taruskin, this made him the first Russian composer to devote so much time to the string quartet medium.
The Estonian National Symphony Orchestra is a symphony orchestra based in Tallinn.
Levon Ambartsumian is an Armenian classical violinist and conductor. Levon Ambartsumian currently lives and works in Athens, Georgia, United States.
Aleksandr Lazarevich Lokshin (1920–1987) was a Soviet composer of classical music. He was born on 19 September 1920 in the town of Biysk, in the Altai Region, Western Siberia, and died in Moscow on 11 June 1987.
Boris Davidovich Belkin is a Soviet-born violin virtuoso.
Konstantin Saradzhev was an Armenian conductor and violinist. He was an advocate of new Russian music, and conducted a number of premieres of works by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Modest Mussorgsky, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Prokofiev, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Shostakovich, and Aram Khachaturian. His son Konstantin Konstantinovich Saradzhev was a noted bell ringer and musical theorist.
The Kharkiv Philharmonic Society is a leading musical organization in Ukraine, promoting classical music, contemporary music, and Ukrainian folk music.
Rudolf Borisovich Barshai was a Soviet and Russian conductor and violist.
Revol Samuilovich Bunin was a Soviet composer.
Gara Garayev's Symphony No. 3 was composed in 1964. It was the last of the composer's three numbered symphonies and it marks a development from his two previous contributions to the genre, composed in the mid-1940s during his studies in the Leningrad Conservatory under Dmitri Shostakovich. It was one of the first serial symphonies composed in the Soviet Union, fusing the twelve-tone technique with Azerbaijani folk music influences in the ashug tradition in the frame of a classical structure, attempting to find to new ways of artistic expression, new principles of form and construction, and, most notably, new means of expressive musical language and wanting to prove that strictly following the twelve-tone technique it is possible to write nationalistic music, and not simply nationalistic, but specifically ashug according to the composer.
Andres Mustonen is an Estonian conductor and violinist.
Yuri Alexandrovich Falik was a Russian composer, orchestral conductor, cellist, a board member of the Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) branch of the Composers' Union, and People's Artist of Russia.
The Five Fragments, Op. 42 is a suite for small orchestra composed on June 9, 1935, by Dmitri Shostakovich. It was the only work, apart from film music, that he composed that year. He approached it as preparatory work for the composition of the final version of his Symphony No. 4.
