***
to Hide the fact that I sang was more difficult. At this time we have created a secret society of music lovers. As conspirators, not to know the teachers, we got “edges”, the records on x-rays, and spend hours listening to jazz music. Why the society was secret? Just what we listened to, was not included in the school curriculum, and order in the school at the Baku Conservatory was very strict.
Remember, we were in love with lolita Torres – we knew all her songs, tried to sing them in her manner. But to do it in the school building was impossible if I played or sang anything from Torres or Presley, which we are too fond of, that I would be kicked out or in class or even from school.
***
If the program, it seemed that no difficulties will be, how to look on stage, there were problems. In addition, I, the southerner, was not a winter coat, and in Moscow has already started cold.
Yevgeny Primakov told me how his first wife, who worked at the Studio “Melody”, came home one day and said, “Came the boy from Azerbaijan, such a skinny, modestly dressed, a jacket like hers. But the singing…”
Generally, the costume was mine, but sanosan and smoothed so that it could look like in the mirror. And I grew up from it: I grew up fast then and even to stay lifted weights. But still in dreams I fly, and say, while flying, are growing. Coat borrowed from Baku a friend of Vladimir Vasiliev.
***
During the scene in which Tosca has killed Scarpia, I did the following: modeling plasticine ball, which was poured watercolor red paint. When the Longing of a dagger struck me, I pressed the bulb, paint squirted on your shirt, and it seemed that it was blood.
In “Tosca,” I did not like that. In our production was so conceived that the wounded Scarpia went up to the door to call for help. Losing strength, he rolled down the stairs and fell down dead. I asked specifically for me to set to stage something like a ladder so I could effectively die, slipping from the steps. To get hurt I was not afraid, because I trained, was able to be grouped, and the coat was dense and strong. Only once had a mishap – I rolled backstage, where protruded just my legs. Maria Bieshu, the Longing, had all his actions – to put a cross, put a candle near the body – to do the almost behind the scenes.
***
the Concert was better than I expected. In the first part, Bach, Handel, Mozart, Rossini, Schubert, Hajibeyov… But instead announced on 16 things I sang 23.
… Went sedate part of the audience. He turned off the light, took the piano, and the scene from the balcony, the cheap seats are all flocked a crowd of admirers, three hundred. They stood and clapped… I went in already dimly lit room and after ten or twelve prostrations asked to return the piano. At the Philharmonic the Protocol�� concert finished, the artist time to rest. What is out there! We’re in the midst was a natural third division. I sat at the piano – it was then time for music. Come prima, Guarda che Luna and twist Celentano “Twenty-four thousand kisses”.
Michael Nozhkin, actor, poet, people’s artist of Russia:
I have long passed into the classics – Chekhov, Tiutchev, Mayakovsky, Nekrasov… Many of these great half-forgotten today. Mr Putin, as he himself wrote about Esenin, is able to bend that no one in the world could not! Does anybody know how to write today – “Where are you, cheerful teaser? Covered to the rod! To take in to tear! What our satirist crushed and bestobell!” I have at hand “the Poem 1929-30 years” – I read it, amazed and upset: because no one remembers!
And why do you think I “Once in the depths of winter…” remember 6 years? Yes, because this is about us, Muscovites, preschoolers, bursting into the war and in hospitals, nurses can help, and on the roof “lighter” to extinguish. Me in 41-m, by the way, “the sixth was passed.” And there are those cheerful teaser among the current guys?
