Dear Gentlemen,

In this blog I have tried to assemble a list of prominent Soviet tenors – tenors behind the Iron Curtain – singers the careers of which went largely obscure from the Western public because of the political realities of the era they were part of – realities which dictated the detachment of the Soviet opera from its Western counterpart.
It just so happened that these times were the Golden Era of the Russian Opera, and the voices that were hidden behind the Iron Curtain were of a remarkable quality.
In addition to that, the revival of these voices in the West is also of much interest because of the unique character and the idiosyncratic nature of the Soviet school of operatic singing, which was different from the Western in many aspects.
By “voices behind the Iron Curtain” I mean those artists whose entire career or a significant part of it developed during the most ideologically radical years of the Soviet rule and the Soviet Union’s disconnection from the West, and not those who had already established a name for themselves in an earlier period, or those who have only started their way in Soviet Union’s very last days or are singing well into the present – both are more familiar to the Western public.
In cases of some of the singers the information and the recordings presented here is all that is left of them, and in some cases appears for the first time in the internet, or in English and for the Western public.

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Vladislav Pyavko (1941)





Born on February 4th in Krasnoyarsk. People's Artist of the USSR (1983)
Graduated from musical school in a class of accordion.
Entered State Institute for Theatrical Arts where he received higher musical and producer education.
In 1965 won a very hard competition to be received to a vocal apprentice group of the Bolshoi Theater.
In 1967 was sent to two years training in La-Scala.
In 1969 won the first place and got the gold medal of the International Competition for Vocalists in Belgium, and in 1970 - a second place and the silver medal of the Chaikovsky International Competition for Vocalists in Moscow.
Then started performing for the Bolshoi Theater.
His concert repertoire is comprised from more than 500 compositions.
In 1989 Pyavko is the soloist of the German State Opera (Berlin).
In the 1980-ies during 5 years he is teaching in the Vocal Faculty of the State Institute for Theatrical Arts.