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Isaak Dunayevsky: Moonlight Waltz (from 'Circus')

3,258 views · Published 27 October 2018 · 2:28 · Indexed 27 September 2026

Channel: PSearPianist · 2018 · Music

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Phillip Sear plays a 1960 piano arrangement of a song from the popular Soviet musical 'Circus' (Цирк) by the Ukrainian Jewish composer Isaak Dunayevsky (1900-55).
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Isaak Dunayevsky (1900-55) studied in Kharkiv, and made an early career there, before moving to Moscow (and also Leningrad), where he worked as a music hall conductor and composer of operettas and much other music.   His collaborations with the film director  Grigori Aleksandrov produced some of the most popular Soviet movies of the 1930s.  Although Dunayevsky was a Soviet jazz pioneer, this piece is much more in the mould of Lehar,  Benatzky, Stolz and other early 20th century Viennese operetta composers.  This waltz was actually written for the movie's female lead, who was also an accomplished singer, and there is an excellent vintage recording on YouTube (  https://goo.gl/bL9X9Z  )by the remarkable Polish singer Halina Mickiewiczówna (1923-2001).  The musical itself is about an white American circus performer with an illegitimate black son, who finds freedom from racial prejudice in the Soviet Union, and my thumbnail shows a Soviet poster for the movie.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ------------------------------------------------------- Played by Phillip Sear
http://www.psear.co.uk (Email:  [email protected]  
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