“The best traditions of domestic music culture live on in Yuri Butsko’s deeply national music”, wrote Music in the USSR magazine. When a student of the Moscow Conservatory, Yuri Butsko composed the opera 'Diary of a Mad Man after Nikolai Gogol' (1963) which subsequently became generally recognized.

Firma Melodiya presents a recording of Yuri Butsko’s opera White Nights, based on a novel by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Giving his opera a subtitle 'sentimental', the composer emphasized its lyric and intimate orientation as if continuing the line of Tchaikovsky’s 'lyric scenes'. White Nights is a chamber opera where the events take place through a lyric narration and the monologues of its two characters - Nastenka and Dreamer, who is in love with her. Following Mussorgsky’s and Prokofiev’s traditions, the composer preserved Dostoyevsky’s original prosaic text, revealing a peculiar poetic musicality in the great writer’s early romantic novel.

White Nights was premiered in Dresden in 1968 to great success, but has never been staged in this country.

This recording was made by Gennady Rozhdestvensky, a recognized interpreter of 20th century music, and the All-Union Radio Big Symphony Orchestra in 1973 with the participation of Galina Pisarenko and Anatoly Mishchevsky, People’s Artists of the RSFSR and soloists of the Stanislavsky and Nemirovich-Danchenko Music Theatre.

Cast:
- Galina Pisarenko (Nastenka)
- Anatoly Mishchevsky (The Dreamer)

Recorded in 1973