Alexander Gradsky - Marina Raikin

"Interlocutor" № 12, March 1987 g.

- ... On the piano notes - but all strikethrough. It is difficult to make out ...

- Who is working on the opera "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov.

- be honest - not afraid to take on such work?

- To be honest - I do not want to take him. Libretto by Pavel Grushko lay in my eight years. I know that many musicians have tried to do something, afraid of speculation on the subject. And only two years ago - at a time when I did not have musical ideas - I got the libretto. I getting something to try. Friends came, I showed them the things ready. In their reactions it seemed to me that we should continue to work. Here I continue.

The internal passions, framed in a passionate music - that's what is interesting to the modern viewer. All this is in the novel. Therefore a sin to move away from the subject and come up with something of their own. We must try to capture the spirit of Bulgakov and pass it through music. I would like it to be an independent work, but in any case not a musical film adaptation, not to impose their reading.

- And yet, you see, it is difficult to imagine a musical embodiment of this novel.

- For me, Bulgakov's novel - Babel of various literary styles. He is eclectic in the best sense of the word. Naturally, there was a thought: Do not be in a musical style to do the same? That is to gather into a single musical language totally different genres, forms, styles, I speak. Will there cancan, hard rock, opera pieces and excerpts from Stravinsky, Strauss, Berlioz, Rossini. To musical performance was not variegated and diverse.

- It is an album?

- and perhaps triple or quadruple. Who knows? Many will be soloists, chorus. I want to involve those who participated in the recording of the rock opera "Stadium". That is all I can say.

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Alexander Gradsky - S. Vladimirov

"Melody" № 2 (43), April, 1990 g.

- What I'm doing now. I continue to work on an opera based on the play of Pavel Grushko "was or was not." At the heart of it all - the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita." I do three or four plates. Together with me - he Pasha Grushko, Sergey Zenko, our saxophonist Vladimir Vasilkov, drums, technical team: Vladimir Shilov, Viktor Glazkov Sergei Remizov. Work is interesting, as do the common cause and understand each other, and this is very important for creativity ...

***

Alexander Gradsky - M. Bolotovskii

"St. Petersburg Gazette", March 9, 1994 g.

- ... And what are you working on now? In the music world go some rumors about one of your great project ...

- Now I want to release the eight or nine compact plates with all their records, and during this time to prepare for the production of the opera "Master and Margarita", which I do for twelve years.

- But this work is not finished yet?

- Yes, she still has not started properly! This is a very serious work. In any case, the fact that her record, I have the consent of very famous people. Hvorostovsky, for example, no matter how strange. The level here is so.

- And other than the name, sorry for the lack of tact, in this opera is a little ... Bulgakov?

- You know, I really like Bulgakov, and this novel - one of my favorites. Of course, the opera - is something fundamentally different. But I try to be meticulous. I even sang the text, not the libretto, and a real singing prose text, so as not to be removed from Bulgakov. How it all out - do not know yet. It is because I am not sure whether it will be good, I'm afraid all of this to make public.

- But it is possible, by the beginning of the next century ...

- It is possible that before ...

***

Alexander Gradsky - Eugene Ezerskaya

"TV Park" № 14 (204), April 1998 g.

- ... i write fragments of the opera based on the novel "The Master and Margarita." It is synthetic, consisting of many musical genres, it will be like a novel. Writing is designed for CDs. Sometimes it is hard to believe that I would ever finish the work on the opera ...

*

I Prepared by Oleg Petukhov, June 18, 2000