Galina Vishnevskaya

Galina Vishnevskaya Sings Tchaikovsky: “Iolanta’s Aria” and “Lullaby”

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Composed in 1891, Iolanta, Op. 69 was Tchaikovsky’s eleventh and last completed opera. On the evening of December 18, 1892, it shared a double premiere with the ballet, The Nutcracker, at Saint Petersburg’s Mariinsky Theatre. Mahler conducted the Vienna premiere in 1900. Then, the work fell into relative obscurity. Set in one act, Iolanta is based on a story by the Danish writer, Henrik Hertz (1798–1870). Iolanta is a fifteenth century French …

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“Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk”: Excerpts from Shostakovich’s Censored Opera

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Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1932 opera, Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, inhabits a grim world of “lust, loneliness, and murder.” Described by the composer as a “Tragedy-Satire,” it hovers somewhere between chilling terror and “grotesque vaudeville.” The dark plot, based on a novel of the same name by Nikolai Leskov, is centered around Katerina Ismailova, a bored and oppressed merchant’s wife who lives in a provincial town. As John Henken writes in his summary, …

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