On An Overgrown Path

The quirky independent French label Edition Hortus hits all the right buttons for me. They refuse to follow fashions, and continue to find unexplored repertoire, and present it with a passion and flair that puts the major labels to shame. Missa Russica uncovers a treasure trove of sacred Russian choral music from little known composers – Stepan Degtiarev (1766-1813), Dimitri Bortniansky (1751-1825), Maxine Berezovsky (1745-1777), Artemy Vedel (1770?-1808), and Mikhail Strokine (1832-1887) - see below for biographical note on Strokine. During the 18th century Italian composers lived and worked in the imperial court in St Petersburg , and these Russian composers assimilated Western compositional techniques into an East/West fusion of sacred choral music. The majority of the pieces were intended for performance during Holy Communion, while the sacraments were being taken by the priests and the congregation waited. The excellent performances are by the Riga Russian Orthodox Music Cho...

A wonderful concert by the Hermitage Ensemble of Russian singing sacred hymns and folk songs in the beautiful little Sibton Church of St Peter in Suffolk (the ruins of a Cistercian Abbey can be seen close to the church) took me down the overg rown path of Russian sacred choral music. Two outstanding recent releases from the innovative Dutch super-budget label Brilliant Classics are highly recommended. The Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris is famous for its tradition of Russian Orthodox chant. In 1967, under their director Evgeni Ivanovitz Evetz, they recorded an anthology of Russian Orthodox Church Music. Evetz was born in Poland of Russian parents, and his status as a Russian 'displaced person,' meant that he made his reputation as a refugee building and conducting choirs, first in Morocco and then in Paris. The anthology features composers ranging from Rachmaninov and Arensky to many lesser-known figures, and has now been released as a double CD . The sound isn't dem...

I am a Russian composer, and the land of my birth has inevitably influenced my temperament and outlook. My music is the product of my temperament, and so it is Russian music. I never consciously attempt to write Russian music, or any other kind of music, for that matter. I have been strongly influenced by Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, but I have never consciously imitated anybody. I try to make my music speak simply and directly that which is in my heart at the time of composing. If there is love there, or bitterness, or sadness, or religion, these moods become part of my music, and it becomes beautiful, or bitter, or sad, or religious. For composing music is as much a part of my living as breathing or eating. I compose music because I must give expression to my feelings, just as I talk because I must give utterance to my thoughts. These are the words of Sergei Rachmaninov, and his intense patriotism means that Russian performances of his sacred music in particular are considered as...

During the 20th century several inspirational church figures were catalysts for the creation of new art and music in England. Probably best known is the Anglican Reverend Walter Hussey , whose commissions in the 1950s and 60s included Henry Moore’s sculpture Madonna and Child , stained glass from Marc Chagall , Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb and Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms. Less well known is the influence of the Russian Orthodox leader Metropolitan Anthony of Sourozh, who inspired one of the seminal works in 20th century sacred music, John Tavener’s Liturgy of St John Chrysostom. Born in Lausanne, Switzerland, Metropolitan Anthony had early musical connections as his uncle was Alexander Scriabin . The future Metropolitan’s father was a member of the Russian Imperial Diplomatic Corps, and as a child Metropolitan Anthony lived in Russian and Persia. The 1917 Russian Revolution forced the family to flee to Paris where the young exile took a doctorate in medicine at...

The liturgical music of the Orthodox Church contains many riches, and discs already featured here such as Brilliant Classic’s Sacred Russian Choral Music and Liturgy of St John Christendom, and Ivan Moody’s Akáthistos Hymn are in constant rotation in my CD player. They have been joined recently by another disc from the enterprising Gagliano Recordings label, this time of music by a contemporary Greek-American composer new to me. Tikey Zes was born in Southern California in 1927, and studied with Ingolf Dahl . His career has included recording the music of Ockeghem , and holding the posts of Professor of Composition at San José State University and choir director of the Greek Orthodox Church of St Nicholas in San José, and my photo above was taken in that church. The new Gagliano CD Tikey Zes Choral Works includes sacred pieces from the Orthodox liturgy starting with the Great Doxology . As well as liturgical music Tikey Zes has composed a song cycle for high voice and piano on p...

~~ For me the existence of Pablo Casals is a source of joy. He is one of those artists who come to the rescue of humanity's honour ~~ Thomas Mann Commequiers is one of those villages that you only seem to find in France. It is in the Vendée region in the west of the country, a short distance from the Atlantic coast. Despite being close to the fashionable resort of Les Sables d'Olonne this is rural France that time seems to have passed by. The timeless houses huddle around a small square in the centre of Commequiers. There is a bar and boulangerie , and on one side of the square is L'eglise Saint-Pierre with its wonderful new reinterpretation of an organ of the classic French school seen to the left of my header photo. The Vendéee , with its history of political and religous activism, is a long way from Spain. But we made the journey there in search of a musician famous for expressing his beliefs through activism. Pablo Casals was born in El Vendrell in Catalonia, Spain ...

Norman Lebrecht getting it wrong is so commonplace that it hardly justifies comment . Except when it is a journalist on his own paper pointing it out. Here's Fiona Maddocks writing in the Evening Standard . Wrong, wrong and wrong again, thundered my colleague, Norman Lebrecht, in yesterday's Evening Standard , thereby guaranteeing the BBC's forthcoming Tchaikovsky Experience more curiosity and interest than the corporation's publicity department could have dreamed of affording. His attack was on the BBC's cultural turpitude in general, and the choice of the all-time "chocolate box" composer for this wall-to-wall, complete works treatment in particular. The BBC, no doubt, can fend for itself. But the view that Tchaikovsky's music is merely decorative and devoid of deeper meaning is now so outdated that I must urge Norman, politely, to get out more. Recent major studies by Richard Taruskin and Stephen Walsh have reminded us - though our ears tell us...

Few people have heard of the town of Zwickau in the former East Germany which we visited recently, and if they have it is probably in connection with the huge car factory there. Today's Volkswagen plant is a symbol of the post-unification free market. But the huge manufacturing facility was previously the home of another car that came to symbolise the economic failure of the GDR , the Trabant . Three million of the plastic bodied two-cylinder cars rolled off the Zwickau production line under communist rule. Prior to 1989 Trabants were banned from West German roads due to their very high pollution levels - five times as much carbon monoxide and nine times as much hydrocarbon as the average Western car. But post-unification Trabants have the run of German roads, Trabi safaris are all the cool thing in Berlin, and their iconoclastic status is confirmed by the post- Wende image above painted on the remains of the Berlin Wall . The Trabants simple plastic construction coupled with a ...

Dutch budget re-issue label Brilliant Classics has released a double CD of Russian Orthodox liturgies and folksongs sung by the famous Don Cossack Choir and Jaroff Women's Choir conducted by their founder Serge Jaroff, and it is available in the UK for less than £6 . As David Cavlovic reminded us in a recent comment , the Don Cossack Choir, seen above, sung on Herbert von Karajan's 1967 recording of the choral version of Tchikovsky's 1812 Overture. This remarkable choir was formed by exiled Cossacks in a Turkish internment camp in 1921 under the direction of Serge Jaroff , who had been a lieutenant in the army of Tsar Nicholas II . As their fame increased the choir were based in Bulgaria, France, Austria and then America, where they were managed by the impresario Sol Hurok . Serge Jaroff conducted the choir for sixty years, became an American citizen and died in New Jersey in 1985. Below is a a YouTube video of the Don Cossack Choir directed by Serge Jaroff singing in ...

In the photo above I have just arrived at the Coptic monastery of Dayr al-Salib (Monastery of the Cross) on the East Bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt. The Trappist monk, mystic and author Thomas Merton wrote of le point vierge - the virgin point - and described how there is "at the center of our being a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth... which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will". Le point vierge is found in different forms in the great wisdom traditions including the esoteric strand of Islam known as Sufism, and it is from this tradition that Thomas Merton developed his vision of a point of pure truth. In Zen Buddhism the vision is manifested in what Shunryu Suzuki famously described as 'beginner's mind' . This vision is also found in popular culture: for instance in John Lennon's Imagine, which - in an unashamed hymn to le point vierge - implores us ...