YEREVAN TO MARK 110TH BIRTH ANNIVERSARY OF COMPOSER ISAAK DUNAYEVSKY

ArmInfo
25.02.2010 15:26 GMT+04:00

/PanARMENIAN.Net/ Moscow House in Yerevan will mark the 110th
birth anniversary of composer Isaak Dunayevsky on the initiative of
Rossotrudnichestvo representative office in Armenia.

Soviet composer Isaak Dunayevsky was born in Ukraine in 1900. He
began as a student of classical music. After the Russian Revolution,
he played with avant-garde forms but eventually settled into composing
popular music. His first big hit was the score for Makhno’s Escapades
(1927), a circus scenario that mocked the civil war anarchist leader of
a Ukrainian partisan band opposed to the Bolsheviks. Dunayevsky went on
to compose some twenty film scores, a dozen operettas, and music for
two ballets and about thirty dramas. His lasting legacy is the music
from the enormously popular musical films of the 1930s: Happy-Go-Lucky
Guys, Circus, Volga, Volga, and Radiant Road, all featuring the
singing star of the era, Lyubov Orlova, and directed by her husband,
Grigory Alexandrov. A fountain of melody, Dunayevsky wove elements
of folk song, Viennese operetta styles, and jazz into optimistic
declamatory tunes that captivated Soviet listeners for decades. The
lyrics of the most famous of these, "Vast Is My Native Land" (1936),
from the film Circus, celebrated the official image of Russia as a
great nation, filled with free and happy citizens. The Dunayevsky
mode was overshadowed somewhat during World War II, when more somber
and intimate songs prevailed. His postwar hit, the music for Kuban
Cossacks (1950), enhanced the propaganda value of that film, which
idealized the affluence of Cossacks and peasants on the collective
farms of the Kuban region. Dunayevsky died from heart attack in 1955.