Butsko: White Nights

“The best traditions of domestic music culture live on in Yuri Butsko’s deeply national music,” wrote Music in the USSR magazine. When a student of the Moscow Conservatory, Butsko composed the opera Diary of a Mad Man after Nikolai Gogol (1963) which subsequently became generally recognized. Firma Melodiya presents a recording of Yuri Butsko’s opera White Nights based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Giving his opera a subtitle “sentimental”, the composer emphasized its lyric and intimate orientation as if continuing the line of Tchaikovsky’s “lyric scenes”. Moreover, White Nights is a chamber opera where the events are given through a lyric narration and the monologues of its two characters Nastenka and Dreamer who is in love with her create a basis of the dramatic concept. Following Mussorgsky’s and Prokofiev’s traditions, the composer preserved Dostoyevsky’s original prosaic text revealing a peculiar poetic musicality of the great writer’s early romantic novel. White Nights was premiered in Dresden in 1968 to a great success, however it has never been staged in this country. The recording was made by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, a recognized interpreter of 20th century music, and the All-Union Radio Big Symphony Orchestra in 1973 with the participation of Galina Pisarenko and Anatoly Mishchevsky, People’s Artists of the RSFSR and soloists of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre.