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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Nikolay Timchenko (1927)






Born on December 12th in the town of Chistyakov, Donetzk region. Acclaimed Artist of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (1968)
In the age of 15 Timchenko went as a volunteer to the front, served on the Baltic fleet for the whole duration of the war.
He stood out in the sailor's amateur performances. After the war he won a singing competition and turned a soloist of the Ensemble of the Baltic Fleet.
In 1949 ensemble of the Baltic Fleet participated in the festive concert in Moscow, which K.E.Voroshilov attended. The young singer voice drawn his and everyone's attention by the its brightness and softness, beauty of timbre. K.E.Voroshilov gave Timchenko an advice to study vocal in a professional institute.
In 1950 he entered Moscow Conservatory, his teachers were the famous tenors, soloists of the Bolshoi Theater N.Ozerov and S.Yudin. When being a student he already gave concerts all over the country and abroad.
After the successful completion of his studies in 1955 he was accepted into the group of singers of the Bolshoi Opera Theater.
In 1961, with the first group of young talented soviet singers he was sent to Italy, where he trained in La-Scala. His teacher was maestro Barra.
With equal success he sang both opera arias, romances and folk songs.