Monday, November 23, 2009

That stinking Cold War crap

Those of us who love opera know perfectly well that back in the 50s, an ignorant bunch of misguided, McCarthy-led idiots wouldn't let the great Boris Christoff sing here because we just couldn't have an opera dude from behind the Iron Curtain set foot on the Metropolitan. Yes, those sneaky Bulgarian bassos might have ended the American way of life with their open-throated craziness! That story has never failed to annoy the shite out of me, and I've often wondered how many more phenomenal singers we / I missed out on because of that idiocy. Surely, a school of singing as accomplished as that of the Soviet Union would have produced more than one great singer during the Cold War years! Over the last few years, thanks to the advent of YouTube, I've been finding more and more relatively unknown Soviet-bloc operatic jewels. Zurab Sotkilava, Muslim Magomaev, Nicolae Herlea, Pavel Lisitsian, Irina Arkhipova... and the latest find: my Armenian brother from another mother, Barseg Tumanyan.


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