Russia

Russia is known first for the classical composers Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Shostakovich, whose works remain among the most performed in the world. In the Soviet era it produced bard song, the poet-singer tradition of Bulat Okudzhava and Vladimir Vysotsky, alongside official stage pop led by Alla Pugacheva and an underground rock scene built around Kino and Aquarium. Since the 1990s it has added dance-pop, Russian-language rap and experimental electronic music, while Tuvan throat singing represents one of the distinct cultural traditions within the country.

Vladimir Vysotsky was an actor at Moscow's Taganka Theatre and the most popular singer-songwriter of the Soviet Union, despite having almost no official record releases at home during his peak years. His hoarse, urgent songs about war, labour camps and ordinary life spread on home tape recordings copied from one listener to the next. When he died in July 1980, during the Moscow Olympics, huge crowds gathered for his funeral without any official announcement.

The Leningrad Rock Club opened in 1981 as a state-sanctioned venue where amateur rock bands could perform under official supervision. It became the home of Aquarium, Kino and Zoopark and the centre of a scene whose songs circulated mostly on self-made tapes. Kino's Viktor Tsoi became the scene's defining figure, and his death in a car accident in 1990 turned songs such as Gruppa krovi into lasting anthems.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky is the most widely performed, through the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker and his First Piano Concerto. Sergei Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto and Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini are fixtures of the concert repertoire, and Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring caused a sensation at its 1913 Paris premiere before reshaping modern music. Dmitri Shostakovich wrote fifteen symphonies under Soviet rule, with the Fifth, first performed in 1937, the most often played.

Tuvan throat singing, called khoomei, comes from the Republic of Tuva in southern Siberia, which is part of the Russian Federation, but it belongs to the Turkic culture of the Tuvan people rather than to ethnic Russian folk traditions. Singers produce two or more pitches at once, often imitating wind, water and animals of the steppe. Huun-Huur-Tu are the best-known ensemble internationally and have toured and recorded widely since the 1990s.