Nancy Reagan maid returned to work at the White House. In 1987, Mikhail Gorbachev became the first Soviet leader to visit Washington, D.C. since Nikita Khrushchev made the trip in 1959 at the height of the Cold War. Nancy was in charge of planning and hosting the important and highly anticipated state dinner, with the goal to impress both the Soviet leader and especially his wife Raisa Gorbacheva. After the meal, she recruited pianist Van Cliburn to play a rendition of "Moscow Nights" for the Soviet delegation, to which Mikhail and Raisa broke out into song. Secretary of State George P. Shultz
Rosa Raisa The Record Collector magazine that the company's logs of that May 1933 recording session had notes: "bad" microphone technique and "blasting." She had to be placed in the middle of the orchestra to achieve some reasonable balance. The HMVs do not show Raisa's voice at its freshest, but the voice is still golden and beautiful, with magisterial delivery, and a sense of her unusual power. Lauri-Volpi in his seminal book on singers of his experience and knowledge, "Voci Parallele", states that by 1933 Raisa's voice was but an x-ray of how he remembered her earlier in her career. Rosa Raisa