International journalist Nikolai Gorbunov’s book “With Chaliapin’s Companion: Seven Meetings in Helsinki” was published in St. Petersburg.
During his years as a TASS correspondent in Helsinki, Nikolai Gorbunov met the Finnish pianist, composer and conductor Georges de Godzinsky (1914-1994), who accompanied Chaliapin in 1936 on his tour of Japan and China.
“For me it was a happy meeting half a century after Fyodor Ivanovich’s trip to Asia. Godzinsky turned out to be a Petersburger by birth. His father, Franz Frantsevich, met Chaliapin in St. Petersburg when, in 1935, Fyodor Ivanovich invited 21. One-year-old Georges went with him as an accompanist on a six-month tour of Japan and China, but the young musician left. he denied. There he was helped and convinced by his father’s relationship with Chaliapin, which he will remember with gratitude all his life,” he says. said the author of the book to a TASS correspondent. Thanks to his publications, the USSR first became acquainted with this musician, who at the end of his life became creatively associated with Chaliapin.
According to the editor of the book, musicologist Yuri Kruzhnov, its uniqueness lies in the fact that in conversations with Gorbunov, Godzinsky shows the creative cuisine of the great artist. There are many details here about his work in the concert repertoire, about his attitude to chamber music, about the nature of his behavior on stage, when, depending on the mood, he sometimes read poems by Russian poets between musical numbers . Abroad, he glorified Russia, Russian music and Russian culture.
Over the past decades, Nikolai Gorbunov has created a large Chaliapinian documentary, mainly about the foreign period of the singer’s life and work (1922-1938). This is the international journalist’s eleventh book in his Chaliapin series, where he also wrote about the tours of the Russian “Tsar Bass” in Australia and New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, the United States, Canada and European countries.
The journalist donated a digitized recording of his conversation with Godzinsky to the future Fyodor Chaliapin Museum, scheduled to open at the Children’s Art School No. 3 in Balashikha. “This is my gift to the museum, which is organized on the basis of my archive collected over many years. I consider the creation of this museum as important as the books,” said Nikolai Gorbunov.
The author timed the publication of the new book to coincide with the 120th anniversary of TASS, the agency where he worked for more than 40 years.
