The great hall in Leningrad is splendid as ever... The colored glass glitters beneath the magnificent lights... The velvet seats harmonize exquisitely with the crimson carpets spread here and there.
On the white, lily-colored walls are reflected gilded hues from astonishing paintings. A deep strain is heard from a violin... and another strain, calm and tender, rises from another. Then a powerful sound rings through the hall... every noise in the hall dies down, and a deep, awesome silence reigns over it, announcing the beginning of the concert.
The conductor of the orchestra appears, and at one motion of his baton every instrument of music submits to him.
The orchestra begins to play "Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony," and something like enchantment takes hold of the audience as they listen to this deep yearning.
In the front seats sat a young girl with black hair, leaning on her hands; in her deep eyes and in her pale face the onlooker could see what a deep, insistent feeling this girl felt as she listened to the music of this immortal Russian composer.
Who was that girl?
She is Veronika Dudarova...
Twenty years of age.
She was four years old when her elder sister used to play pieces on the piano at home — pieces at which the little girl felt herself carried into another world; she would draw near her sister and listen with her heart and her whole life, then strive to repeat some of the passages she had learned by heart...
When she reached the age of eight she entered the Baku Conservatory of Music, established for children gifted in music.
In this conservatory Veronika's talents began to unfold into a rare musical genius; the strains of the piano no longer satisfied
her soul, for there had grown in her an insistent longing for deep, unfathomable music.
And the girl resolved to become the conductor of a symphony orchestra...
She entered the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Music in Moscow, in the department set apart for conductors.
Her teachers noticed her strong aptitude for it, her deep feeling, the fineness of her ear, and her wonderful memory.
One day the director of the conservatory said to her: You will become an orchestra conductor, Veronika.
And in the year 1946, in the very hall where the sweet dark-haired girl had once sat in her childhood listening to Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony, a great throng of people
listened to that same orchestra playing the immortal symphony under the direction of Miss Veronika Dudarova...
In every town of Russia, Veronika's orchestra gave programs of magnificent music by the great musicians — Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, Rachmaninoff, Borodin,
Glazunov, Liszt, Schubert — and Veronika feels that she has a musical mission which she must carry out in full for the children of her homeland, for she is ever a herald of the finest musical culture.
She herself opened, with a splendid ceremonial concert in the largest of Moscow's theaters, "International Women's Day."
This girl meets with brilliant success and wondrous esteem.
A short while ago, and for the hundredth time, people sat in Gorky Park listening to the orchestra of this rising young woman playing "the Fifth of Tchaikovsky," Russia's most famous musician.