Text a one of the leading interpreters of music: conductor yevgeni mravinsky

“Yevgeni Mravinsky's manner of conducting is quite free from any attempt at impressing the listeners; all he does is to present music to us. In this music there are no traces of exaggeration or striving for outward effect – the forceful idea is brought out with overpowering clarity while the resulting musical structure speaks with unshakable conviction. The youthful vigour of tone conjured up by his magic baton is simply astonishing. His austere, academically restrained manner gives no indication of a tone of such full-blooded power. “Truly, he is one of the greatest men of our time”, the Japanise “Sankei simbun” wrote on May 28, 1973.

Yevgeni Mravinsky's art is discussed in hundreds of critical articles, most of which state that in his person the Russian school of conducting has a brilliant representative, a profound artist.

In 1938 Mravinsky won the First USSR Conductors’ Competition and was appointed Principal Conductor of the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra. He performed his duties with enthusiasm and purposefulness, gaining the respect and admiration of the members of the orchestra while he set clear and profound tasks to them convincing his artistic principles and using well-thought-out educational methods. Work under that talented master-conductor marked a new stage in the history of the orchestra. Since that time the Leningrad musicians have developed a performance style of their own, a harmonious blending of each musician's individual traits with their conductor's unique characteristics. The qualities distinguishing the orchestra's playing are first of all, a noble simplicity combined with perfect artistic mastery and, secondly, an astonishing sense of ensemble. Through hard training Yevgeni Mravinsky has made each musician feel every detail of the score during the rehearsal, realize its role in the musical whole. This feeling of ensemble leads to another valuable quality of the orchestra – the sense of style. At the same time Mravinsky constantly warns his musicians that the manner of performance is not anything fixed permanently, that time influences the interpretation of any work of art. So the works of Tchaikovsky are performed today differently from the way they were played ten, twenty, thirty years ago. Even the Shostakovich's symphonies whose standard of performance has been established by the Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra under Yevgeni Mravinsky are subject to change. In this way the sense of style is closely associated with a sense of the Contemporary – which every soloist as well as every performing body must possess.

It is no exaggeration to say that there are no commonplace performances under Mravinsky – each is an event in musical culture. The tours of the orchestra in the country and abroad become real feasts of music. Capacity audiences, enthusiastic press and letters of admiration bear witness to the tremendous impact of this musician's art.

For his outstanding services to music Yevgeni Mravinsky has won many honours, among them is an extraordinary one: he is an honorary member of the Vienna Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (the first name in the list is that of Beethoven who received this honour in 1826).

Proper Names

Vienna [vI’enq]

Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde – нем. Общество любителей музыки (the Vienna Society of Musicfriends)