#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. Irina Subocheva, a deputy of the Krasnoyarsk region’s Legislative Assembly, has brought the music notebooks donated to the city by the composer’s family. Sets of five notebooks were received by the Norilsk college of arts, a music school, and groups from the Talnah and Kayerkan art schools.
While sorting through family archives, the composer’s niece, a former Norilsk resident who now lives in Krasnoyarsk, Lyudmila Vahmenina, discovered 250 manuscripts by Yakov Rassin. In her opinion, such a treasure should serve contemporaries.
Yakov Rassin and Ekaterina Iofel came to Krasnoyarsk in 1978 and became the founders of the solo singing and opera training department at the newly opened Institute of Arts. The famous Soviet composer worked with such masters as Leonid Utesov, Isaak Dunayevsky, Klavdiya Shulzhenko.
“Each of the found works is worthy of being published, musicians will understand me. One problem is that I am a philologist by education, I worked in journalism all my life and had no idea how to properly format musical texts. I began to look for allies in this difficult matter and found them. Thus, thanks to the help of the Krasnodar State Institute of Culture’s piano department’s professor, honored artist of the Russian Federation Tatyana Sorokina and the Russian composers’ union member Sergey Anikienko, five editions were published. We decided to make them in the form of music notebooks that can easily be placed on a music stand. Each notebook is unique”, says Lyudmila Vahmenina.
Each of the five music notebooks is a kind of cycle from the musician’s life. The music in them touches on the theme of lyricism, patriotism, and the fifth collection includes children’s songs and many arrangements and vocalises – the style of jazz singing.
Yakov Rassin’s niece thought it would be right to give several sets to the musicians of her hometown, especially since she is the daughter of a once famous person in the city – Galina Vahmenina, the former head of the culture department from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s, and later the head of the city museum for two years.
Irina Subocheva donated a set from the published edition of Rassin’s found music notebooks to the students of the Norilsk college of arts. She presented the second set to the staff of the city’s music school.
The same sets of five notebooks will later be donated to the staff and students of children’s art schools in Talnah and Kayerkan.
These manuscripts will be used in classes, and the Norilsk residents will probably hear the works of Yakov Rassin more than once at city concerts.
The gifts for Norilsk did not end there. Lyudmila Vahmenina also donated part of the family’s personal archives to the city museum – primarily those that directly relate to its history.
“Part of Galina Vahmenina’s personal history, who headed Norilsk culture for many years, directly concerns Norilsk, and it has been preserved in photographs, documents, badges. Looking at them, you can find out what lectures were held in certain years, what events the city residents attended, what important anniversaries were celebrated. A significant part of the collection from Lyudmila Vahmenina has already been donated to the city museum, and I think it is very timely: on the eve of the institution’s anniversary celebration. I am sure that the staff will exhibit some of them, plus the Norilsk museum has a large interactive program, in which the donated materials will also be useful”.
The Norilsk museum director Natalia Fedyanina confirmed that there are 80 thousand storage units that do not gather dust in storerooms, but are regularly exhibited to viewers:
“You know, Norilsk has a special memory, and this memory leaves with each person who leaves the city, and they are the majority. We value the memories of everyone, but especially of those who made a significant contribution to the city, because these personal things reflect a whole layer of city life. In Galina Vahmenina’s donated materials there are unique things – for example, her album about the entire period of her leadership in the culture department, a tile from the cafe From Two to Five, works of local artists, many documents, photographs. And also badges, real rarities. They are small editions and very representative of Norilsk: dedicated to television, the city’s dance life, the children’s music school. Many were made in our city. We still have to disassemble them and evaluate the date in connection with which they were released. In a word, this is a very important addition, for which we are grateful to Lyudmila Vahmenina, and the valuable cargo from her came to us in batches. I’ll tell you a secret: another one is now coming to us by the Yenisey. People will definitely see all this at exhibitions”.
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Text: Maria Sokolova, Photo: Anton Malyshev
