Patrick Bade
Russian Diaspora Singers

Patrick Bade | Russian Diaspora Singers | 07.06.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- There were two great political upheavals in the first half of the 20th century that caused the dispersal around the globe of enormous numbers of talented people, first was the Russian Revolution in 1917, and the second was the Nazi seizure of power in Germany in 1933. Now, musical talent is, I suppose, the best passport that you can possibly have, and this is probably more true, I suppose, for instrumentalists that I’ll be talking about on Sunday. Singers, their art is connected to language, and also, particularly in the early 20th century, singers would be trained in a particular vocal tradition, it’s very different today, where opera houses around the world have language coaches and singers are trained, I mean, if you go to vocal competitions like the Ferrier competition in London, which I often go to, the singers are expected to be able to sing in several different languages, and to be competent in different vocal styles. So Russian opera was a minority taste outside of Russia, the Russian operas were very peripheral to the repertoires in the great houses of the world.

Paris was a bit of an exception, because it seemed like the whole of the Russian aristocracy had decamped to Paris, there was a very big Russian community, and they could support private seasons of Russian opera, these continued through the interwar period, you see the programme for one here. And there were a few other cities that had a particular taste for Russian opera, curiously, one of them was Barcelona, where they did yearly seasons of Russian opera, and they would import Russian singers, and they would import Russian conductors, you can see Serge Kusevitski conducted Prince Igor in Barcelona. So the singers who fled from Russia, mostly around 1920, 1921, they had very peripatetic careers, it was difficult for them to put down roots in one place. I’m certainly going to play you some wonderful voices, some very great singers today. But there you have the feeling that in the end, very few of these singers realised their full potential outside their native land.

And a typical example, really, is my first singer, Nina Koshetz, one of the most gorgeous soprano voices of the 20th century, was a tremendous, tremendous talent. And she certainly had highlights in her career, such as singing in the world premiere of Prokofiev’s “Love of Three Oranges” in Chicago in 1921, but there is a sense that, as with so many of these singers, that her talent was to some extent wasted. Now, she was born into a Jewish family in Kiev in 1894 the timing of her debut at what was still the Imperial Court Opera was not ideal, 1917. And shortly after that, she set off on a concert tour of Russia accompanied by Rachmaninoff. And she claimed, well, it’s been disputed, I think there’s evidence for it, that she had a passionate affair with Rachmaninoff, as you can see, when she was young, she was absolutely gorgeous. So she was a singer who also had a strong sense, I think, of her Jewish identity, and she made records of songs in Hebrew. I’m going to start off with her very beautiful, haunting version of Ravel’s setting of “Kaddish”.

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This is a photograph of her on that tour in 1917 with Rachmaninoff, and he wrote a set of love songs, which he dedicated to her. She only occasionally appeared in opera after leading Russia, her main career, as with many of these singers, was in the concert hall, she managed to get out of Russia with a Ukrainian choir that was touring United States. So she went straight from Russia to United States, and as I said, in 1921, she was in Chicago, in the ‘20s she came back to Paris where there were better opportunities for her. But in the concert hall, as well as singing Russian songs, she was very well known for singing Spanish songs, and more than one Hispanic composer dedicated works to her, the Catalan composer Joaquin Nin, and the Mexican composer Ponce devoted his song “Estrellita” to her, I’m going to play you that, it’s so exquisite, such a beautiful version, well, it’s a very beautiful song. And actually, of course, there are other wonderful versions of this song, including Galli-Curci.

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She has such a wonderful way of floating that voice and doing this exquisite diminuendi and crescendi. Now, she ended up in California, and she ended up looking like this, and if you know her at all, this is probably how you know her, because she took lots of cameo roles in Hollywood movies in the 1930s and 1940s as a grumpy old Russian woman. My next singer is Maria Kurenko, who was born in Siberia in 1890. but she made her debut in Ukraine, at the Opera House in Kharkiv in 1916, and then she went on to the Bolshoi in 1918. But again, when things got really bad in 1920, she fled first to Riga, then onto Berlin, and then to Paris, and then finally to America where she spent most of her career.

But she was never, in fact, I don’t think any of the singers I’m playing you today were ever invited to sing at the Met in New York. And of course, America didn’t really have a whole system of local opera houses in the way that most continental European countries have. So she sang just one performance in Chicago, she sang an odd performance in Los Angeles, probably the most important evening of her career was when she sang in the American premiere of Stravinsky’s “Mavra” in Philadelphia in 1934. It’s a lovely voice, it’s somewhat lighter and brighter than Koshetz, but you’ll hear, I think, a family resemblance, in fact, I think between nearly all the female voices in this talk, this was a time when singers of a certain culture or nation all had a certain similarity. Here she is in the role of Massenet’s “Manon”, which she did sing on stage.

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I am going to move on to her version of the Last Rose of Summer, this was immensely popular sort of encore piece for sopranos in the late 19th, early 20th century, and dozens of Sopranos recorded the piece. My great friend Alan Bill Gore, who was a wonderful mentor to me, I think known to many listeners, he was a great figure, really, in the collecting community, and also in the Jewish community in North London. And he always used to say that there are two versions of this aria, which are incomparably beautiful, Maria Kurenko, and the American soprano Edith Mason. He said he could never make up his mind which was the more beautiful, each time he listened to one, he thought that was the most beautiful. In fact, they’re quite similar in their approach, they’re boasting it very, very slowly in a very dreamy way, hanging onto notes, and particularly is the most exquisite climactic note in this version.

♪ 'Tis the last rose of summer ♪ ♪ Left blooming all alone ♪ ♪ All her lovely companions ♪ ♪ Are faded and gone ♪ ♪ No flower of her kindred ♪ ♪ No rose-bud is nigh ♪ ♪ To reflect back her blushes ♪ ♪ Or give sigh for sigh ♪ ♪ To reflect back her blushes ♪ ♪ Or give sigh for sigh ♪

This is Oda Slobodskaya, she was born into a Jewish family in Vilnius in 1895, and she trained in St. Petersburg and made her debut, again, in the fateful year of 1917. And like so many others, by 1921, she realised there wasn’t really a future for her in Russia, so she left for Paris, and already the next year, she had a great success in the Paris premier of Stravinsky’s “Mavra”. In the '20s, she sang quite a lot in Berlin, and in the '30s she came to London, where she spent the rest of her very long career. And she sang at Covent Garden, she sang in a performance of “Tannhauser” with the great Lauritz Melchior. Weirdly, she was chosen by Sir Thomas Beecham to sing in the premiere of Delius’s opera “Koanga”. But her career, again, was mainly in the concert hall. I’m going to play you two things that she recorded, the only record, really, that shows her voice at the absolute height of its beauty in its first freshness, it’s a record that was made in 1931, and it has the daydream from “Sorochyntsi Fair” on one side, Parassia’s daydream, and it has Rachmaninoff’s “Lilacs” on the other side. And you just think, oh my God, why didn’t they make more records of her when she sounded like this? The later records are wonderful interpretations, her voice is not quite so pristine and wonderful. Apparently, she had a recording contract in New York, she was going to America, and she missed the boat and didn’t arrive, and the contract was then broken. But anyway, here is Oda Slobodskaya in 1931, with her voice at the height of its beauty.

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And this is Rachmaninoff’s “Lilacs”, which is on the other side of this 78 RPM record.

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Vladimir Rosing was born into a very wealthy family with aristocratic connections, his father was a very successful lawyer, but he very early showed an inclination to become a singer, and he was trained in Petersburg, and he actually made his debut in a concert in 1909. No, 19, I’m not sure of the date, with Jasha Heifetz, still a child, was the other person taking part in the concert. Well, he inevitably, as an aristo, he had to flee from Russia. And he sang quite a lot in London, he was very successful in London, he occasionally sang in opera. The voice was is not a great voice, it wasn’t really a voice for major roles in the major opera houses of the world. But he was an extraordinary man, very multi-talented, he had a successful career as a concert singer, as an impresario, and later, in America, he was a very successful and prolific director of opera. His concerts were a huge success in London, and George Bernard Shaw said that he thought that after Chaliapin he was the most remarkable singing actor of the day. And you’ll get a real sense of that in this record I’m going to play you, “Famine” by Cesar Cui, and he does a little spoken introduction to tell you what’s happening in this song, and it’s a marvellously vivid piece of vocal acting.

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• [Vladimir] “Famine” by Cesar Cui. It describes the peasant who is starving, he can hardly walk, his sways. His face is all puffed up from eating soda. He crawls to the field, and he begins to speak to the young corn. And he says, “Corn, beloved corn, 'tis I who has put you into the earth, please grow up quickly so that I can eat you.” And then he goes mad and says, “And when I’ll be able to bake some bread, I’ll eat everything myself without giving a single crumb to any one of my family.

[Clip ends]

Now, I’d be very interested if any of our South African listeners can tell me more about this singer, Xenia Belmas. She was Ukrainian, and she trained at the Conservatoire in Kiev and made her debut in Odessa, but like so many others, she fled in 1921. And in the 1920s and early '30s, she had some major successes in both Berlin and Paris, and she made a series of records in Berlin, around about 1930, that have always been very much admired by record collectors. And then she travelled the world, she toured Australia, in 1934, she toured South Africa with her husband, who was her accompanist, a man called Aleksandr Khinchin. And simply, she was at the height of her career, and she decided to just give all everything up and settle in South Africa. It’s rather mysterious, I dunno whether they were Jewish or not, maybe at 1934 they thought, hmm, they’d be safer and happier in South Africa than they would be in Europe. Anyway, this is her singing "The Nightingale and the Rose” of Rimsky Korsakov, and again, it’s a very distinctive voice, a very Russian voice, that’s not dissimilar to Koshetz and the other Sopranos I played you.

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Now, Ivan Zhadan was also Ukrainian, from a very humble background, he was from an area very much in the news at moment, Lugansk, in the east of Ukraine, where of course Stalin came from as well. And he was from a humble background, started off as a blacksmith, and when he did his military service, his voice was discovered, and he managed to get to St. Petersburg and to get a training. And by the '30s, he was a major soloist at the Bolshoi, and earned the favour of Stalin. But this was very ephemeral, when the Russians invaded, this lightning attack on Russia, he was in a dacha with his family, and they found themselves outflanked by the Russians, and they were taken prisoners. And he managed to survive the war through his singing, he pleased, of course, the German troops by singing for them. This was fatal, because at the end of the war, anybody who had been taken prisoner by the Germans were automatically regarded as traitors by Stalin. And tragically, and terribly, many of these people who were completely innocent were then forcibly returned to Russia, where they were either murdered or they were sent off to Siberia. He managed to go into hiding and escape this fate, and he managed to get with his wife to America, where he spent the rest of his life, but it was a totally blighted career. But this is a very lovely record, it’s not dissimilar in style to the great tenors Kozlovsky and Lemeshev, but if anything, I think the voice is more sweet, more beautiful, in this lovely song by Rachmaninoff.

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Exquisite dying fall there at the end of that song. Now, this is Maliza Korjus, she was, I can say, the first great love of my life, I heard her on the radio, I would’ve been five or six years old, and ah, it was like, struck by lightning. And very soon after that, in Bognor Regis, where we lived at the time, over the summer, they showed her great movie success, “The Great Waltz” an MGM film from 1938, as a B movie to Doris Day, “Don’t Eat the Daisies”. And I went every single day for a week, and I spent the whole day in the cinema watching “The Great Waltz” twice, I had to put up with Doris Day in between, but it was worth it for me to see my idol. And I’m going to play you, she was Polish, she was born in Warsaw in 1907, had a career in the early '30s in Berlin, at the Berlin State Opera. But as I said, she was picked up by MGM for this movie, was an nominated for an Academy Award, and oddly never made another Hollywood movie. But here she is in a song from the movie “The Great Waltz”.

♪ One day when we were young ♪ ♪ That wonderful morning in May ♪ ♪ You told me you loved me ♪ ♪ When we were young one day ♪ ♪ Sweet songs of spring were sung ♪ ♪ And music was never so gay ♪ ♪ You told me you loved me ♪ ♪ When we were young one day ♪

Joseph Rogachewsky was born in Ukraine in 1891, and he went to Paris to study at the Conservatory in Paris before the First World War. So when the war broke out, he actually joined the French Army as a volunteer, and then found himself stranded, really, in France at the end of the war. And he had a major career that was largely based in Paris and Brussels, he was a top favourite with Brussels audiences in the '20s and '30s, fled to America during Second World War and sang with the New York City Opera. It’s a very mellifluous voice, a very appealing voice, not, I would say, especially Russian sounding, but I suppose that probably reflects his French training.

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Wonderful diction, how beautiful he makes the French language sing, French is a very difficult language to sing in, particularly for non-French singers. This is Jennie Tourel, she was born in Vitebsk to a Jewish family, her real name was Davidson, and she and her family fled from the revolution and they went to Paris. And so, she didn’t train in Russia, she trained in Paris with a Russian singer called Anna Eltour, and it was in homage to her teacher that she took the name Tourel. So in the '30s, she was a very popular singer at the Opera Comique, which of course is quite a small theatre. She didn’t have an enormous voice, it’s a distinctive voice, and a very attractive voice. So I, I think that when she, she got to the Met, she was two seasons at the Met, her voice wasn’t really simply big enough for the vast spaces of the Met. There is a broadcast that survived of her singing Adalgisa in “Norma” to the huge voice of Zinka Milanov, and really, you can see this was not really for her. So after that she moved to the New York City Opera, but her great career really was in the concert hall, and she was much, much loved by New York audiences over a very long career. First of all, we’re going to hear her in an extract from “Alexander Nevsky”, a very mournful piece, she’s mourning the dead of a battle on the battlefield. This is by Prokofiev.

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We’ll catch her in a very different mood now, right at the end of her career, she was 70, and this is from a live concert, it was her farewell concert, and you sense what a wonderful communicator she was, and you can hear in this concert how the audience absolutely adored her. So this is a very lively piece from Offenbach’s “Blue Beard”.

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• [Jennie] “Barbe Bleu”, Offenbach.

The last singer I’m going to talk about is Kyra Vane, she was somebody I knew very well indeed in the last few years of her life. She was a complicated character, complicated, I met my friend Robin in New York who would say, “Ah, she’s a piece of work,” she was a piece of work, what can I say? It was a tragic life, a blighted life, and I think the immigration of her family, the uprooting of her family, had a part in that, but it’s not the whole story with her. She wrote an autobiography. I mean, you’ll hear it’s a fabulous voice, absolutely gorgeous voice, and you think this is somebody who should have had a world career, but she didn’t, she had a very odd, spotty career, never sang at Covent Garden, sang in the Liceo in Barcelona. Where else did she sing? Copenhagen. Various different houses of the second rank. And somehow the the career never got anywhere, she always blamed other people and, you know, it was the jealousy of other singers, Gobi or Christoff, who sabotaged her.

Or she’d say, “Oh, I didn’t sleep with the right people, I could have sung at La Scala, but I wouldn’t sleep with De Savater and he wouldn’t let me sing at La Scala,” it was always some story like this. When you got to know her as well as I knew her, you could see that there was actually a very self-destructive side to her nature. But anyway, I’m going to play you two excerpts. First of all, this is her voice in all its glory in the 1940s, everything she touched turned to dust, what can I say? And she was involved in a project, put on a very lavish musical, but for various reasons it never came to fruition. And they made test pressings, or pieces from this musical to play to various impresarios and so on. She couldn’t actually remember who the composer was, so I can’t tell you who the composer is, but I can tell you that he’s very indebted to Rachmaninoff, and I think you’ll hear that. And it’s actually quite a gorgeous piece, and it really shows off the beauty of her voice.

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This is Kyra as I knew her, I’m afraid of rather bitter and angry old woman, that she felt that, you know, life had cheated her somehow. And she, at one point in her career, she wasn’t getting the work, or very little work, so she actually got a job at the BBC as a secretary, but they were still occasionally employing her for concerts of Russian songs, broadcast concerts, and she had the rather bizarre experience of leaving the BBC as a Ms. Vane, typist, at the end of the afternoon, and coming back in the evening in her glad rags as Madam Vane and doing a broadcast concert of Russian songs. She did have the satisfaction or being rediscovered when she was in her early eighties, a CD came out, and it caused a lot of excitement, a lot of comment, and then of course she wrote her autobiography. And there was one last fantastic event in her life in the millennium, the New Year’s Eve millennium. she was invited back to to Russia, she said it was an extraordinary experience, 'cause her Russian, I mean she’d left Russia when she was eight years old, she always had a slight Russian accent on certain words, but her Russian was pre-revolutionary Russian, people heard her talk, they were absolutely amazed, and assumed that she must be a Grand Duchess.

And she was invited to sing on Russian television, she sang “Black Eyes,” and it was broadcast around the world. So it was a moment of extraordinary fame right at the end of her life, and she died very soon afterwards. She also made a record right at the end, and I was very much involved in this, and she had a wonderful accompanist, Tzivi Sharet, she’s the daughter of the Israeli president, who is infinitely patient and sweet, and so good at handling Kyra with all her terrible temper tantrums and her problems. And they made this record together, and she asked my advice about what to sing on it, and I was very happy that she agreed to sing a song by a man called Michael White, who was my great mentor in musical matters when I was a teenager he ran the local record shop. Again, you’ve got two blighted lives coming together, he wrote very, very lovely songs, but his career came to nothing, and he was completely forgotten. So I think this was the first ever issue on record of one of his songs, it’s called “Closed Thine Eyes”, it’s by Michael… Sorry, I’ll just play it for you here.

♪ Close thine eyes and sleep secure ♪ ♪ Thy soul is safe, thy body sure ♪ ♪ He that guards thee, he that keeps ♪ ♪ Who never slumbers, never sleeps ♪ ♪ A quiet conscience, in thy breast ♪ ♪ Has only peace, has only rest ♪ ♪ The music and the mirth of kings ♪ ♪ Are out of peace unless she sings ♪ ♪ Then close thine eyes in peace ♪ ♪ And sleep secure ♪ ♪ No sleep so sweet as thine ♪ ♪ No rest so sure ♪

So that was the 80-year-old Kyra Vane singing “Close Thine Eyes” by Michael Scott, and accompanied by Tzivi Sharet. And I’m going to dive now into the comments and questions.

Q&A and Comments

“'Boris Godunov’ presented in Barcelona in 1961.” Yes, they continued after Second World War. In fact, Kyra, she was invited to Barcelona in 1950 for their Russian season.

Q: “Was Ravel Jewish?” A: Though there has been speculation about that, he was from the Basque region, he had Basque ancestry, he certainly wasn’t brought up Jewish, because he had openly expressed very Jewish sympathies, ‘cause he was very much suspected of being Jewish by fascists and Nazis in that era.

Margaret, I’m so glad you loved that “Estrellita”, it’s such a lovely song, isn’t it? And an exquisite version of it. Why is there so little attention paid to crispness or diction? Well, something that mystifies me, is that in some ways present day singers’ linguistic skills are superior to those in the early 20th century, you get some really terrible pronunciation, worse pronunciation than my pronunciation of Russian. I mean, listen to Nelly Melbourne singing in Italian, it’s excruciating. But enunciation was much, much better with the old singers, so pronunciation has improved and enunciation has declined. Yes, he was certainly brought up as a Catholic, he wasn’t brought up Jewish.

Thank you, Arlene. Vibrato, well it’s very contentious, this, and different people will tell you different things, but a rapid vibrato that’s actually part of the texture of the voice, that’s healthy singing, a wobble, where you have unsteady tone, of course that is disastrous. Yes, and they could all shade their voices, couldn’t they, Marjorie? There were a lot of very beautiful pianissimi and diminuendi that I played you tonight. Oh, Daphne, so you knew about my, Alan Bilgora, I think of him as a really saintly man, he was actually one of the nicest human beings I think I have come across him in my entire life. “First male singer,” that is Vladimir Rosin, Vladimir Rosin. On my list.

Q: “Was Stalin from Georgia?” A: Yes, you’re right, of course he was, Well, I don’t know, somewhere I read that he and Zhadan were from the same area.

Thank you. This is Marjorie saying she also remembers Alan Bilgora from the London Jewish male Choir, yeah.

Q: “What happened to the singers families?” A: Well, I dread to think, actually. Well, I’d said that in 1920 and 1921, I don’t think the Soviet Union was that well organised to be able to systematically persecute the families.

Yeah, that song is Rachmaninoff’s song, of course, the “Oh, Cease Thy Singing Maiden Fair”, Kyra Vane, it wasn’t her real name, her real name was Knopmuss. Well as always, everything is listed, you would’ve been given the list if you couldn’t manage to work it. Thank you very much for your nice comments, I know it was a bit of a specialist thing, tonight’s lecture, so it’s not for everybody. Yes, that’s why I hesitated, it’s Michael White, it’s not Michael Scott, I think I must have had a brainstorm when I was typing that out.

Yes, Tzivi Sharet. “Were the Jewish artists boycotted in Russia in the early,” no, they weren’t actually. And you know, if you had enough talent, you were, in inverted commas, forgiven for your Jewishness, there were a number of Jewish singers, and of course instrumentalists, who had very good careers before the revolution and after.

Thank you. Thank you all very much for your comments, and I’ll be on to the instrumentalists on Sunday.