Product Details

• Format: Classical, Color, NTSC, Black & White
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Kultur Video
• VHS Release Date: February 23, 1999
• Run Time: 112 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 0769720196
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #391,352 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This remarkable music documentary takes us deep into Russian opera, a vast, rich, and (for Western audiences) largely unexplored territory. It gives many great moments from works that have entered the Western repertoire (Boris Godunov, Eugene Onegin, and The Queen of Spades), but its primary attraction for many will be its tantalizing glimpses of some unfamiliar works and extraordinary singers little-known in the West.

There are many performances of intense power and beauty. Three basses, Ivan Petrov, Alexander Ognigvstev, and Alexander Pirogov, sing excerpts from Boris Godunov with excellent work by Andrei Sokolov as Shuisky and Ivan Kozlovsky as the Simpleton. Two tenors, Ivan Kozlovsky and Sergei Lemishev, sing Lensky's aria from Eugene Onegin; a young Galina Vishnevskaya is splendid as Lisa in The Queen of Spades. Among the less familiar operas sampled are Glinka's A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Ludmila, Djargomizhsky's Rusalka, and Tchaikovsky's Vakula and Mazeppa. --Joe McLellan

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A remarkable document on the golden age of the Bolshoi Opera, June 10, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Russian Opera at the Bolshoi: The Vintage Years [VHS] (VHS Tape)

The tape contains opera snd song scenes with the greatest of the Bolshoi stars from the 30's to the 60's and 70's. Highlights include Lisitsian, Reizen, Lemeshev, Kozlovsky, Archipova. Petrov. Ognivtsev, Mikhailov, Pirogov. The quality of the archival transfers is quite professional and the 112 minute tape is packed with material - no time is lost with loose talk! For me, the entire tape is full of great singing, but the highlights of this one are the miraculous voices of Reizen and Lisitisan.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rare Footage and Brilliant Singing from Moscow, March 24, 2001

By 

David Cairns "Maestro" (Rye, NY United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Russian Opera at the Bolshoi: The Vintage Years [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Not only is the vocalism of these exceptional glimpses of historic Bolshoi performances stunning, the video contains scenes from Glinka's operas "A Life for the Tsar" and "Ruslan and Lyudmila," as well as a scene from Dargomizhsky's "Rusalka." Tapes of these works cannot be found in the West; thus this video is also an important historical document. Other offerings are from the more-to-be-expected Mussorgsky and Tchaikovsky operas. A remarkable bonus is a performance of Gremin's aria from "Eugene Onegin" by Marc Reizen at age 90 (!), still in tip-top vocal form. The overview of the other virtuoso singers is just as thrilling. For anyone who likes good singing, this tape is a MUST!

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marvellous all-round, January 28, 2005

By 

Plaza Marcelino (Caracas Venezuela) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Russian Opera at the Bolshoi / Chaliapin, Kozlovsky, Vishevskaya (DVD)

If you have the slightest interest in russian opera, you just can't miss this. In surprisingly good images and sound (the material being several decades old but carefully restored), in this two-part documentary you will be presented with gems from works all too little performed in western opera houses and from singers the tragic confluence of the Stalin terror and the second world war mostly prevented from travelling west; actually, most of the featured singers will be known in western countries solely from recordings licenced by western companies after the war.

Russian singing schools produced some vocal timbres very much of their own, not quite correspondent to western ones. Their performing styles also were typical, highly theatrical and the documentary shows both features aplenty. There are arresting Boris Godunov impresonations from Alexei Pirogov and Ivan Petrov and there's even the odd Vishnevskaya clip from before the times she and husband Rostropovich emigrated in the 1970's. There's no point in copying here the whole list of participants in the whole documentary, interested readers can check out the disc's contents in this website, all I want now is to commend Kultur and Warner Video for this effort whilst encouraging them to keep on delving into russian archives as, who knows, besides the Bolshoi Nestierenko Boris Godunov I commented elsewehere on this website there must be other complete performances of, say, Evgueni Oneguin, again Boris Godunov (were the Petrov sequences shown in the documentary taken from a complete performance? -if a complete Petrov "Boris" exists in video, what are you waiting to make it available????-), Queen of Spades and God knows what else, gathering dust in said archives, produced by soviet television and Mosfilm that would be enthusiastically received by collectors worldwide.