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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Solomon Hromchenko (1907)





Born on December 4th in Zlatopol, Kiev region. Acclaimed Artist of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (1947)
As a boy participated in a synagogue choir.
From 1929 to 1932 he was studying in the Kiev Conservatory (class of M.M.Engel-Kron), after that - in the graduate school of the conservatory (class of K.N.Dorliak).
Then Hromchenko was a soloist of Jewish Academic Choir.
Was a laureate of the I all-USSR competition of musicians and singers (1933).
In 1934-1957 he was the soloist of the Bolshoi Theater, singing there alongside Kozlovskiy and Lemeshev.
Among his roles: Lensky, Bayan, Faust, Sinodal, Prince Igor, The Young Gipsy, Yurodiviy, Alfred, Duke..
In his vast repertoire Hromchenko had opera arias, soviet mass-songs, neapolitan songs, jewish folk songs, the romances of Glinka, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, songs of List, Schuman, Brahms, Mendelssohn.
Had a very flexible voice and a perfect diction.
Hromchenko taught and was a professor of the cathedral of solo-singing of the Gnesin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute.
In 1991 Hromchenko went to Israel, where he continued to give concerts and teach, becoming a professor in the Jerusalem S.Rubin Musical Academy.
Died in 2002 in Moscow.