GENNADY CHRISTMAS – AT THE SERVICE AT MUSIC

Among the outstanding conductors there is a man who is called the pride of the world performing art – this is Gennady Rozhdestvensky. A legendary person, through the bends of whose life you can trace the history of culture of the 20th century, because he stood behind the conductor’s console for more than 60 years.

The statistics of the creative life of Gennady Rozhdestvensky rolls over: for the last thirty years alone, he conducted more than 2,000 times on stages and in studios; worked with over a hundred orchestras; The geography of tours totals 37 countries and two hundred cities. Not one conductor has such achievements.

Son of musicians
The authoritative conductor of Europe performed with almost all famous symphony orchestras in the world. The name of Gennady Rozhdestvensky symbolizes the impeccable taste and firmness of musical convictions. The master harmoniously combined an innovative approach to musical art and at the same time conservatism. Without a doubt, he is one of the most educated people of the past and present centuries. Although he said that he associates himself with the 20th century, he is grateful to the 21st for a limitless sense of creative freedom. Only in our time could he play where he wants, when he wants and what kind of music he wants, which was impossible to imagine even during the years of the Soviet regime.

Gennady Nikolaevich was born in the family of the metropolitan intelligentsia on May 4, 1931. Father is the famous conductor Nikolai Anosov, and his mother is the soloist of All-Union Radio Natalya Rozhdestvenskaya. Parents from early childhood introduced the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky son to art, learning notes with him. The most vivid impressions from childhood are the announcement of the beginning of the war, the evacuation, return and digging up of the piano, on which he studied. The owner of the apartment in which the family lived buried him in the ground so that the Germans would not get the tool. It turned out that the piano was preserved in the ground and still stands in that apartment.

Matter of chance
In the year of Victory, Gennady went to study at the Gnesins’ music school, where he studied with Elena Gnesina herself. Then he went to the music school at the conservatory, from where he entered the conservatory to professor Lev Oborin. Meanwhile, the father continued to improve his son’s skills in conducting skills. Nikolai Pavlovich taught Gennady to manage the orchestra without the help of hands. Then Rozhdestvensky taught students at the Moscow Conservatory to conduct conducting with his eyes alone.

The impulse that led him to conduct, Gennady Nikolayevich considered one case that happened to him in a music school. He walked down the corridor from classes and in one of the classrooms he heard the sounds of Tchaikovsky’s sextet, “Remembering Florence”. Opening the door to the classroom, Rozhdestvensky saw that students were having difficulty learning this work. Then he began to conduct them and realized that helps them in their performance. The feeling of this help captured the future maestro as a whole. At that moment, he realized that the profession of a conductor would become a matter of his life.

Gennady Rozhdestvensky – conductor of the Bolshoi
Even during his studies at the conservatory, Gennady Nikolayevich headed the student orchestra, with which he began to actively perform at the large conductor Gennady Rozhdestvenskensky in the country. At the age of 20 he was taken for an internship at the Bolshoi Theater, where after competitive selection he took the post of ballet conductor, who worked for 9 years.

Debuting the ballet The Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky, Gennady Rozhdestvensky continued his ascent to the top of the conductor’s art by participating in the productions of The Humpbacked Horse and Carmen Suite by Shchedrin and Bizet, Spartak by Khachaturian, The Nutcracker by Tchaikovsky and War and Peace by Prokofiev .

For five years as a conductor of the Bolshoi Theater, the orchestra performed almost 40 operas and ballets. In parallel, the maestro led the Grand Symphony Orchestra of the All-Union Radio and Television.

Window to Europe
In an era when all art was under the hood of the party, Rozhdestvensky was able to propagandize the works of avant-garde artists who were allegedly not noticed by “obedient” conductors. At the same time, Gennady Nikolaevich became the first conductor from the USSR, who was able to work in Europe. In 1972 he was released on a tour to Stockholm, after which the wand and remote control master received an invitation from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of Sweden to lead him.

Gennady Rozhdestvensky said that the conductor must be a dictator, who affectionately conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky can convince the orchestra musicians of the correctness of his idea and make him believe in the idea, adhering to the general line laid down by the composer.

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Gennady Nikolayevich was happy that for such a long-term work as a conductor, in spite of everything, he had never betrayed his own artistic convictions. He considered this criterion of creativity to be the main one.