Sergey Lemeshev

Film version of the Rimsky Korsakov opera from the Pushkin story. Motsart i Salyeri (Mozart and Salieri), based on a legend that Salieri poisoned Mozart, meditates on the nature of creativity while introducing, in brilliantly compressed speeches, what was to be one of the important Russian themes—metaphysical rebellion against God.

Meet A 105-year-old Olga Markovna Kolyadenko, a former Bolshoi theater opera singer and the only remaining student of director Konstantin Stanislavsky. She still teaches vocals in her Moscow apartment. Konstantin Stanislavsky, who taught Olga Kolyadenko, created the famous acting system that was later adapted in the USA by Lee Strasberg.

The film, consisting of separate concert numbers of various genres, starred outstanding ensembles and masters of the arts of Moscow and Leningrad — the Symphony Orchestra of the Leningrad Philharmonic, the State The USSR Folk Dance Ensemble led by Igor Moiseev and many others.

A donkey, a goat, a marmoset and a leering bear arrange a quartet.

Talented cabbie with aspirations as a singer spends afterhours practicing with an amateur opera company, ignoring his sweetheart, the femme cab dispatcher.

The Demon (1960) is a Soviet opera-film based on the eponymous opera by Anton Rubinstein. The plot derives from Lermontov's Demon, a poem which was banned for decades due to its sacrilegious content. The titular demon is a fallen angel, a figure of negation and a brooding anti-hero. He falls in love with Tamara but his love destroys her. The Demon is played by the brilliant Estonian singer Georg Ots.