On Saturday, February 27, 1999 at 9:00:00 AM UTC+1, Larry Friedman wrote:
> While I'm tempted simply to say "What he said!" in response to your excellent
> posting, so full of truth and insight, I would like specifically to add that I too
> love the sound of Russian orchestras. That special sound owes a great deal to the
> cultural connections that have existed for hundreds of years between Russia and
> France, and it is a sound that has been a part of the "orchestral psyche" in both
> countries for just as long - at least until The Great Homogenization took hold.

This is the familiar fallacy. The 'typical Russian sound' is not what Tchaikovsky heard when he was conducting his own works. The orchestral sound people imagine to go back to times before reliable recordings existed is Stalin's preferred sound. Loud, unsubtle and in your face. Stalin liked it that way. Russian ballet changed irrevocably, too, in Stalin's era. The funny thing is when choreographers and researchers tried to bring back the old, original Petipa choreographies, the audiences were unhappy. They wanted the ugly Grigorovich Swan Lake etc they were used to.

Many of the Soviet conductors were born around the 1890s, which makes them contemporaries of Stravinsky, Kodaly, Honneger, Martinu and Milhaud. Something of a bygone era, though some of their recordings survive on disc, mainly mono.

Samuil Samosud b. 1884
Nikolai Golovanov b. 1891
Aleksander Gauk b. 1893
Vassili Nebolsin b. 1898
Yevgeny Mravinsky b. 1903
Boris Khaikin b. 1904
Aleksander Melik-Pashaev b. 1905
Konstantin Ivanov b. 1907
Kirill Kondrashin b. 1914
Yevgeny Svetlanov b. 1928
Gennady Rozhdestvensky b. 1931
Velery Gergiev b. 1953