condition (records/cover): NM / VG+ (light wear)   Gatefold sleeve.

Rodion Shchedrin's first opera had its premiere at the Bolshoi Theatre on 25 December 1961 and was performed exactly four times before being quietly removed from the repertoire. The reason, as Shchedrin described it, was the contrast it presented with the expected Soviet operatic idiom: its Freudian undertones, its use of folk ditties and rural limericks rather than patriotic grandeur, its collision of operetta, lyrical folk song, and modernist harmony within a single work. A character in the second act quotes the 1936 Pravda headline that had been used to condemn Shostakovich: "Muddle instead of music." In 1961, with Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk still unrehabituated, this was not a safe gesture.

The opera is set in a Soviet collective farm after the war. Its heroine, Varvara, is the chairwoman - powerful, dutiful, and trapped. The libretto, drawn from stories by Sergei Antonov, uses the verbal texture of the Russian countryside: ditties, limericks, folk song, the rhythmic comedy and underlying despair of a form Shchedrin had encountered during folklore expeditions as a student in Vologodchina. This material - "the passions of a grand opera in the form of Varvara Vasilievna," as the Mariinsky programme put it - collides with more formal operatic writing in ways the state found unacceptably ambiguous. Irina Arkhipova created the role of Varvara and her aria became one of the best-known pieces in her repertoire. The opera was revived in 1972 at the newly opened Moscow Chamber Music Theatre and gradually reclaimed its place.

Recorded in Lithuania by the Academic Opera and Ballet House of the Lithuanian SSR under conductor Rimas Genusias. Melodiya 2LP original pressing.