Concert No. 1

The Trip to Tula

The first concert in our tour dedicated to the 60th Anniversary of the end of WW II was scheduled to take place in the ancient Russian town of Tula, known for its arms manufacturing plants and its citizens’ enormous contribution to the War effort. This town is located 150 kilometers southwest of Moscow.

Everything began as a normal morning,

although the weather was very warm for Moscow. Vladimir Zubitsky, the producer of the tour, picked me up from my apartment on Kutuzovsky Prospect at 10 a.m., and we began our drive to Tula. The concert was to begin at 7 p.m., so we figured that we had plenty of time to get our bearings in Tula and to make sure that everything was set properly for our first concert of this historic tour. Since all of the concerts are free to the public, WW II Veterans were given reserved tickets to this event. City officials and local VIP’s were also invited, but it was good to know that the local council of WW II Vets was handling the distribution of the tickets.

Midway en route to Tula, I received a call from the PR office of Sberbank, the sponsor of the tour, telling me that one of the main electric plants supplying Moscow with electricity had experienced a major malfunction, and that 50% of Moscow was without electricity. Taking into account that at any given time there are over 500,000 people riding the Moscow Metro, not to mention people stuck in elevators, in hospital operating rooms etc. in this city of over 15 million people, one can only begin to imagine the magnitude of this disaster. By now, the unseasonably warm weather had reached 31 degrees Centigrade (87.8 F).

I immediately called the charter bus drivers who were bringing my 300 musicians to the concert: 200 young singers from the Russian Academy of Vocal Arts and 100 musicians from my orchestra. The orchestra had made it through without any problems, but the choir was stuck in the middle of Moscow at an intersection filled with trams and trolley buses, which of course couldn’t move out of the way of the flowing traffic. For the next two hours these poor kids were sitting in an overheated bus, in which the air- conditioning had burned out and the exhaust fumes were overwhelming from both the cars in the street and the bus itself.

I was slowly going into a panic state when I heard about this, but tried to reassure myself that we still had plenty of time before the curtain was to go up, and that whatever the situation, we should be able to get the show on the road in good time. After all it was still just noon…

We finally arrived in Tula at the House of Culture of the Tula Arms Factory, where the concert was to take place. Mr. Zubitsky and I walked into this typically Soviet style building and noticed that it was particularly dark inside. We asked to see the stage. It was then that we saw the stage hands, who were supposed to be setting up the stage with all of the sound equipment and microphones, chairs, stands, choral risers and special banners. They were sitting on the floor in the middle of the stage, drinking Pepsi.

We stormed up to them and asked why they weren’t doing their work. They very calmly answered that there was no electricity in Tula either; that the entire Moscow region, Tula region and Kaluga region were without electricity. Just to put this in the proper perspective: this is a territory three times the size of France.

At this point I was really becoming nervous about the entire situation, and started thinking of alternate programs or something else that we could do out of doors if the electricity wasn’t turned on in time for the concert.

At about 2 p.m., I received a call from Elena Nedosekina, Dmitri Hvorostovsky’s secretary in Moscow, telling me that the car that was to bring Dmitri to Tula had broken down and was being fixed, and that they were going to be late departing Moscow. She of course knew about the complete traffic standstill in Moscow, and was terribly concerned about being able to get out of the city at all.

As it turned out, they were able to leave Moscow for Tula at 3 p.m. Even under normal traffic conditions, the time for the trip is around two hours…

Just then the orchestra pulled up and came out of the hot and stuffy buses into the even more stuffy House of Culture. No restaurants were functioning, so they had to make do with what they could find for food.

The choir was still nowhere to be seen. Cell phones were not functioning, so it was a rare moment when someone could receive a call from anywhere. Therefore I had no idea whether they had left Moscow or not.

By now I could feel my blood pressure rising, and took a few minutes for some very deep breaths…

At 5:30 p.m., to our mutual joy and amazement, the electricity was restored in Tula. It was only then that the stage crew could begin assembling the sound equipment and everything else, since it had been pointless to do anything without electricity. Normally this job would take six hours: setting up the sound equipment; connecting everything; hanging banners; setting up TV cameras, chairs and stands for the orchestra and choir; and, not least importantly, having time for even a small rehearsal and sound check to make sure that everything works properly and sounds good!

To our astonishment, our superb crew was able to accomplish this task in less than one hour. I am only sorry that the TV cameras were not focused on them when all of this was going on. I assure you that it was quite a show!

Dmitri arrived at 6:30 just as I was tuning the orchestra on stage. The choir was on the risers and we immediately began a 30-minute warm-up with Dmitri! The public was admitted at 7 p.m. and the concert was delayed for 30 minutes…

And was it worth it!  The House of Culture filled with Veterans sitting in full uniform with their medals shining — proud of the memories of their triumph of 60 years ago.

Exactly at 7:30, I walked out on stage, turned to the orchestra and choir and started the Russian National Anthem. Everyone in the hall stood and sang along with us with tears in their eyes.

Then the Governor of the Tula region came on stage and made a speech, introducing Dmitri and me to the audience.

From the moment Dmitri opened his mouth, and the first words of the song “The Soldiers are coming” resonated in the hall, I knew that this was going to be a very special event indeed!  After every song, vets with bouquets of flowers descended from the aisles and gave them to Dmitri and me. Screams of “Bravo” broke out each time they recognized their favorite wartime melodies and songs that have been preserved in films about WW II. It was these songs that helped them fight the enemy and save their beloved motherland!

Needless to say, if the hall had had 6,000 seats, it would have been filled, since there were so many people who wanted to attend the concert. So the producer had a huge plasma screen set up in a park outside the House of Culture for those unable to get into the hall.

During the orchestral interludes and choral-orchestral works that we performed, Dmitri would walk out from the back end of the building to greet the people standing in the park watching the performance on the plasma screen.

Ovation after ovation filled this 1,000-seat auditorium; and the entire orchestra, choir and everyone there were overcome with emotion. Honestly, how Dmitri could continue singing with everyone around him in tears is beyond me…but he did. He sang every song as if it were for the first time, filling each song with its own personal meaning for this particular group of people. After the final song in the program, a veteran came up on stage with a beautiful plaque, honoring Dmitri, from the local Veterans organization. This fine gentleman in full uniform spoke to the audience and said, “We all want to thank Dmitri’s parents for giving Russia such a favorite Son!!” At that point Dmitri told the audience that his father was in the hall, whereupon the entire hall started the typical Russian style rhythmic applause; they wouldn’t let up until his father came out on stage, and then the entire audience gave him a standing ovation as well!!

Dmitri topped the evening off with his inimitable interpretation of the Russian Folk Song “Notchenka.”

This is just the beginning of our Hero Cities tour…Wait for the next installment!!

Constantine Orbelian

27 May 2005 | Artist News | Comments