Looking at the Blue lakes

Label “Melody” released a single “Looking at the blue lakes” recordered by a balalaika player Alexander Nikolaychuk and a pianist Elizaveta Baykova. Music is composed by Leonid Afanasiev, the arrangement for balalaika and piano is made by Evgeny Trostyansky.

Music is written as a soundtrack for the movie “Shadows disappear at noon”, which is based on the same name novel by A. Ivanov, where action is happening in a period from the beginning of XX century to the middle of the 1960 years.  

Usually music is being composed on already written lyrics, not the other way around. But this case the lyrics were written by a poet Igor Shafferan just for the 5th episode of the movie, in a previous episodes only instrumental versions of the music were performed.  Directors of the movie V. Uskov and V. Krasnopol’sky thought that dramaturgy required appearance of the song: exactly in the 5th episode the news about the beginning of the Second World War are coming, they decided to use as a basement already known theme.   

After the premier a song became widely known and its popularity has gone beyond the film, in the 1972 “Looking at the blue lakes” has won a radio listeners prize as the best song of the year.

Nowadays, afterwards more than a half of a century since the premier of the film took place, the song continues to live its personal life, its instrumental and vocal versions are performing in a variety of concert halls and recording by the artists.    

Sound engineer – Dmitry Chuvelev

Recording – March 2023