DESHEVOV : ICE AND STEEL

Radio New Zealand Concert network
Sunday 6th of July 2008 at 3 - 4.40 pm

COMPOSER

I have no personal experience, but you can hunt down the book by Larry Sitsky on composers in Russia in the first third of the 20th century.

At that time I will be singing opera myself:

PN Choral Society

Below is the material supplied by Radio NZ for the occasion:

DESHEVOV: Ice and Steel, an opera in four acts
Natalia.......................... Oxana Arkaeva
Subarev........................ Rupprecht Braun
Senka........................... Algirdas Drevinskas
Lukin............................ Dong-Hoon Kim
Hertz............................. Hiroshi Matsui
Whisperer..................... Stefan Röttig
Dymchenko................... Evgeny Taruntsov
Musya........................... Anna Toneeva

Supernumeraries of the Saarland State Theatre,
Saarland State Theatre Opera Chorus,
Saarland State Orch/Will Humburg (Saarland Radio)

Ice and Steel tells the story of the sailors’ mutiny in Kronstadt in March 1921 and the crushing of the insurrection with the help of local metalworkers. Counter-revolutionary agents spread anti-Soviet propaganda and succeed in tempting some workers: news of the Kronstadt rebellion, however, banishes any doubts and unites the proletariat. Brigades of workers are created to go to the defence of Soviet power. The opera ends with the assault on the fortress at Kronstadt and its capture by Red Guards.

Although considerably older and a member of the Proletkult, Deshevov – like Shostakovich – belonged to the innovative and modernist movement.

Ice and Steel was received enthusiastically when first performed in Leningrad in 1930 but at the Stanislavski Opera in Moscow things did not go as well: the audience was less accepting of new works than their compatriots in Leningrad. Critics even potentially sympathetic to the modern musical approach found Deshevov’s treatment of the heroic subject to be emotionally and dramatically shallow.

With the advent of Socialist realism and the more conservative aesthetic atmosphere of the 1930s Ice and Steel was branded as an inevitable failure of formalism.

This peformance of Ice and Steel by the Russian composer Vladimir Deshevov, is performed by soloists and extras from the Saarland State Theatre, with the Saarland State Theatre Opera Chorus and Orchestra conducted by Will Humburg.