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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Anatoliy Solovyanenko (1932)





Born on September 25th in Donetzk (Ukraine), in a family of a miner. People artist of USSR (1975).
Developed an interest to classical opera when he met with the renown ukranian singer A.Korobeychenko, which discerned in the young men the talent of an opera artist. From 1950 Solovyanenko took singing lessons from him, while studying in Donetzk Technical Institute, which he graduated from in 1954.
In 1962 Solovyanenko impressed the jury in a competition of young talents in Kiev by his style and his voice, the lightness of his high voice, and was accepted as an apprentice to the Kiev Opera Theater.
He then won the competition for the place in a group of singers that were going to be sent to La-Scala. From 1963 he studied in Italy under the italian maestro Barra.
In 1965, he started being a soloist of the Kiev Opera Theater.
During 1977-1978 season he participated in 12 stagings of the "Metropolitan Opera".
In 1978 he graduated from the Kiev conservatory, already being People artist of the USSR.