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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Alexander Dedik (1945)




Born on January 19th in Uzbekistan. Dramatic tenor. People’s Artist of Russian Soviet Federative Socialistic Republic (1983).
Graduated from Novosibirsk conservatory in 1970, where he studied with professor O.N.Blagovidova, professor V.P.Arkanov, I.V.Popitchenko, and professor M.A.Zuvanov.
Soloist of the opera theaters of Novosibirsk (1969-1971), Chelyabinsk (1971-1974), Minsk (1974-1979), St-Petersburg Kirov Opera Theater (from 1979).
Among his roles: Canio, Duke, Ismail, Othello, Radames, Manrico, Don Alvarro, Don Carlos, Jermon, Pinkerton, de Grie, Calaff, Turiddu, Werter, Don Jose, Lohengrin, Vodemon, Lensky, German, Sobinin, and others.
Sang alongside such singers as Irina Arkhipova, Elena Obrazcova, Zinaida Palli, Virginia Zeani, Yuriy Mazurok, Vladislav Pyavko, Evgeniy Nesterenko, Irina Bogacheva, Boris Shtokolov, Yuriy Gulyaev, Zinoviy Babiy.
Laureate of the all-USSR Glinka Vocalists Competition (2-nd prize, 1971) and International Tchaikovsky Competition (4-th prize, 1974).
Performed in such Opera Houses as Metropolitan Opera, Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, the Hamburg Opera Theater, State Opera Theater in Prague, the Warsaw Opera Theater, The National Opera in Lion.
Toured USA, Italy, Israel, Germany, England, Brazil, China, Japan, Spain, France, Holland, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria.
From 1997 he performs in solo concerts, in concerts with his pupils, and gives master-classes in Saint-Petersburg, in other Russian cities, in Estonia and all over Europe and Asia.
He is a member of the jury of such vocal competitions as the Claudia Taev Vocal Competition in Talinn, Estonia, The Bibigul Tulegenova International Vocal Competition, The All-Russian Valeria Barsova Vocal Competition.