Melodiya releases for the first time a digitally mastered recording of the Moscow premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Antiformalist Rayok (Paradise).
Antiformalist Rayok was performed for the first time in the USSR on May 13, 1989 at the Grand Hall of the Moscow Conservatory as part of the concert dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich. Secretly created after the composer was accused of “formalism” and “anti-people” attitude, the work was never performed during the composer’s lifetime. Apart from Antiformalist Paradise, the concert included two cycles of arrangements of folk songs and the suite from the opera Katerina Izmailova. Also, actor Mikhail Kozakov recited Anna Akhmatova’s poem “Music” dedicated to Dmitri Shostakovich. The performers were Yuri Vishnyakov, Evgeny Chepikov, Anatoly Obraztsov, Boris Chepikov, Mikhail Kozakov, pianist Igor Khudoley, the State Symphony Orchestra of the USSR Ministry of Culture, the State Chamber Choir of the USSR, and conductor Valery Polyansky.
Inspired by Modest Mussorgsky’s satirical pamphlet Rayok, Shostakovich began writing his Rayok in 1948 after the scandalous resolution, in which the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks accused Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Khachaturian, Shebalin, Popov, Myaskovsky, and Muradeli of “formalism” and “anti-people” attitude. After the resolution and meetings of the USSR Union of Composers, the music of the leading Soviet composers was banned, and the composers themselves were persecuted at the state level.
With his Antiformalist Paradise, Shostakovich sneers at his persecutors and the absurdity of the accusations without mincing musical and literary words. Joseph Stalin himself appeared among the prototypes of the characters, and the final part of Rayok was dedicated to Stalin’s repressions. Final part was omitted from the first two performances – in Washington and in Moscow, but the next performance of Rayok on September 25, 1989 featured the work in its entirety, but in the archive of Melodiya, unfortunately, this record is not.
