Anniversary of Isaak Dunayevsky marked in Yerevan

Soviet composer Isaak Dunayevsky was born in Ukraine in 1900. He began as a student of classical music. After the Russian Revolution, he played with avant-garde forms but eventually settled into composing popular music. His first big hit was the score for Makhno's Escapades (1927), a circus scenario that mocked the civil war anarchist leader of a Ukrainian partisan band opposed to the Bolsheviks. Dunayevsky went on to compose some twenty film scores, a dozen operettas, and music for two ballets and about thirty dramas. His lasting legacy is the music from the enormously popular musical films of the 1930s: Happy-Go-Lucky Guys, Circus, Volga, Volga, and Radiant Road, all featuring the singing star of the era, Lyubov Orlova, and directed by her husband, Grigory Alexandrov. A fountain of melody, Dunayevsky wove elements of folk song, Viennese operetta styles, and jazz into optimistic declamatory tunes that captivated Soviet listeners for decades. The lyrics of the most famous of these, "Vast Is My Native Land" (1936), from the film Circus, celebrated the official image of Russia as a great nation, filled with free and happy citizens. The Dunayevsky mode was overshadowed somewhat during World War II, when more somber and intimate songs prevailed. His postwar hit, the music for Kuban Cossacks (1950), enhanced the propaganda value of that film, which idealized the affluence of Cossacks and peasants on the collective farms of the Kuban region. Dunayevsky died from heart attack in 1955.