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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Artur Aidinyan (1923)






Born in august 1923 in Thessaloniki. People's artist if the Armenian Soviet Socialist Republic (1961).
During World War II actively fought against the German invaders in the underground, was a member of the Greek Ellas resistance group, lost his eyesight in German captivity, only partially healing after undergoing two operations in the USSR.
In 1947 repatriated to Armenia, Yerevan, and turned a soloist of the Armenian Philharmonic (1948), graduated from musical college, then a conservatory, and started giving concerts.
In 1957 a motion picture was made that was based on his life story, named "The Heart Sings", in which he played the main part and sang. The movie was screened in 60 countries.
In 1957 he received a first place diploma and a gold medal of the all-USSR vocalists competition in Moscow. He was also a laureate of the World Youth Festival in Moscow (2-nd premium, 1957). Received the Honor Sign (1956) and other state rewards.
Aidinyan sang in 8 different languages, and his repertoire was wast - compositions of ancient Italian composers, operatic tenor arias, folk songs, romances.