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Old Russian Tango: Petr Lescenco - Ja by tak hotel liubit' (I Need Loving So Much) c. 1930

2,785 views · Published 5 May 2016 · 3:08 · Indexed 10 November 2026

Channel: 240252 · 2016 · Music

Petr Lescenco & Orchestra Hönigsberg-Hecker - Ja By Tak Hotel' Liubit' (I Need Loving So Much), Tango (Sklarov - Mikhailova) Columbia c. 1930 (British)

NOTE: Here is one more beautiful recording by one of the greatest European pop-singers of the interwar period. Petr Lescenco (his difficult Ukrainian name spelled also as Peter, Pyotr, Piotr Leshchenko, Leszczenko etc.) - a simple village boy from the Ukrainian deep province near Odessa, gained enormous international fame between late 1920s/ mid 1930s, when he sung and danced in the Gypsy-Russian style for European nobles and "White" (anti-Bolshevik) Russian émigrés in the best night clubs of Bucharest, Riga, Warsaw, Berlin and Paris. His wonderful vibrant voice, covering a scale from deep baritone to almost a falsetto, and warm, sensuous interpratations of Russian romaces and melancholic slowfoxes acquired for him a surname the Russian King of Tango - an European analogue of Carlos Gardel in Americas. In Bucharest in 1930s he run his own nightclub "Leschenko" (dubbed the "Eastern Maxim's"), where the first part of his show would be dedicated to Gypsy music, but during the second part Leshchenko would dress up in a tuxedo, with a white silk handkerchief and sing and dance Argentine tango. In the Soviet Union his work was banned both because he was believed to be a White émigré and because his "decadent" style was considered as "burgeois" and "counter-revolutionary". Nevertheless, secretly he was very popular in USSR, people would listen to Radio Tehran to hear his music and his '78 records were smuggled into the country from Poland and the Baltics. After the 2nd World War, when Stalin included the kingdom of Romania into the bunch of his postwar trophies, Lescenco with his wife would apply to be granted back the Soviet citizenship, yet only Vera (his wife) was allowed to enter, deceived by the Soviet authorities, that Pyotr already is there. That's how she was trapped into a long-term imprisonment in a Soviet workcamp, while Pyotr was arrested in Bucharest and he died in a prison hospital in 1954.

The slideshow is devoted to the fascinating & sophisticated beaus from the Old Imperial Russia - the characters, that do not seem to exist among Russian people any more.

Old Russian Tango: Petr Lescenco - Ja by tak hotel liubit' (I Need Loving So Much) c. 1930

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