“So evocative, so immediate, so transporting even without its visual anchor” Pitchfork
Mikael Tariverdiev ‘Out Of Shot’ audio:
https://soundcloud.com/earth-r
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Following the release of the critically acclaimed ‘Film Music’ box set and the ‘Irony Of Fate’ OST, Earth Recordings release Mikael Tariverdiev’s score and astonishing improvisations for ‘Olga Sergeevna’. Produced by the composer’s widow Vera Tariverdieva and musician Stephen Coates from original tapes, this release on deluxe double vinyl is the first outside Russia.
Bringing the composer’s extraordinary canon closer to recognition in the west, the score is taken from a 1975 Soviet TV Film series directed by Aleksandr Proshkin. Based on a story by Edvard Radzinsky, the show featured several film stars with the lead role of Olga played by screen star Tatiana Doronina.
Olga is a marine biologist brought from a small town to Moscow by her mentor. The story unfolds into a tangled web of professional, romantic and emotional relationships with the main theme that a woman can dedicate her life to her career and feel satisfied, even when she is not particularly happy in her personal life.
In the USSR, and globally, that was as revolutionary a concept in the 1970s as setting a TV drama around the life of a female scientist. As many critics have noted, Tariverdiev’s music, like the theme of the TV series, contradicts the lazy prejudice that any popular culture to escape the Soviet censor could not be groundbreaking or the equal of anything being made in the West.
The score’s extraordinary baroque jazz inflections were created from improvised pieces with Tariverdiev on celeste, cimbalon, harpsichord and piano accompanied by double bassist Z. Shakhaliev and S. Livshin on drums. The songs feature vocals by Josef Kobzon or the composer himself and the orchestrated themes are conducted by Emin Khachaturian and Yurriy Reetovitch.
At the time of the film’s release, Tariverdiev had recently scored the hugely popular ‘Seventeen Moments Of Spring and was about to work on Soviet blockbuster ‘The Irony Of Fate’. The main theme from Olga Sergeevna was submitted for an American music Academy competition which it duly won, Tariverdiev traveled to LA but was not granted permission by the Soviet authorities to accept the offers of work that followed – probably because of an earlier act of solidarity with his friend the dissident director Mikhail Khalik that saw him banned from the leaving USSR for over ten years.
Pre-order:
https://tariverdiev.bandcamp.
