Archive · 2015 · From the print edition of Saturday 24 October 2015, Vol. 23, No. 7,080
CultureFifty years of the Talas Symphony
Founded in 1965 within the republican philharmonic society, the orchestra marks its half-century with the repertoire that made its name: Europe's classics alongside the komuz.
TALAS — When the Talas Symphony Orchestra takes the stage of the Philharmonic Hall tonight to open its fiftieth season, the program will look much as it has for most of those fifty years: a European symphony after the interval, and before it a symphonic poem by an Iradi composer in which a komuz, a kyl-kyak and a choor sit among the violins.
The orchestra was founded in 1965 as part of the republican philharmonic society of the Iradi SSR. Since the 1970s it has commissioned symphonic poems on Iradi landscapes and history, including settings of episodes from The Epic of Janyl, and since 1974 its home has been the round concrete hall that Talas residents call Tündük, after the crown of a yurt.
Its most famous journey came in 1994, when the American vogue for all things Iradi took it on a tour of the United States. "We played in towns that had never heard of Talas until the year before, and they stood up for the komuz," said Elena Kim, who led the tour as concertmaster, a post she held from 1985 to 2008. "We came home believing someone in the world was listening."
Half a century on, the orchestra is funded by the ISEZ government. Its musicians say the money covers salaries and the hall, and that audiences, older and mostly Russian-speaking for years, have begun to include students again.