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 Orfenov (1908)





Lyric tenor. Born on October 30th in a village of Sushki, Ryazan province. Acclaimed artist of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (1941).
His father was a clergyman with a big family of 8 children, all of whom liked singing.
In 1928 he went to Moscow and entered two schools at once - pedagogical and musical.
In 1933 Orfenov found himself in a choir of Opera Theater Studio under the direction of Stanislavski and a year after that he was a soloist of the Theater.
In 1940-1941 he was working with State Ensemble of Opera under the direction of I.Kozlovskiy.
In 1942 Orfenov went to the Bolshoi Theater, where he sang up to 1955.
From 1954 to 1959 he was the artistic director of a vocal group of the All-USSR Radio.
From 1950 on he was engaged in teaching, as a lecturer in the Gnesin Musical-Pedagogical Institute (1950-1971), in Bolshoi Theater (1963-1969), Cairo Conservatory (1971-1973), and Bratislava Conservatory (1974-1980).
In 1980 to 1984 he was a director of the opera group of the Bolshoi.
Received  the Stalin Premium (1949).