Two great singers often appeared with us at rallies: the soprano Antonina Nezhdanova and the tenor Leonid Sobinov. How they sang! Unbelievable! Nezhdanova’s performance of Elsa’s aria from Lohengrin was a marvel. When Sobinov did Tchaikovsky’s song “In the Midst of the Ball”, he seemed to be talking to you, not performing. And his rendition of Lensky’s aria from Eugene Onegin, heartbreaking! Sobinov as Lensky really asked with regret and sorrow, “Where have you gone, the golden days of my spring?” Other tenors, such as Ivan Kozlovsky, popular in the Soviet Union, merely shouted those words without any meaning. << less