This is an impressive
conspectus of Russian liturgical music.
In Gloriæ Dei Cantores one has
a choir of eloquent and idiomatic depth
and their director, Elizabeth Patterson,
encourages strongly powerful sonorities
in this most demanding of repertoires.
From Vassily Titov (b c1650) to Georgy
Sviridov (who died in 1998) the disc
is a necessarily brief but well crafted
selection to embrace unison and monophonic
chants, polyphony, the westernized sacred
choral concertos as well as the more
accustomed responses and arrangements
of chants.
The choir, based in
Cape Cod, has made a number of tours
to Russia. Its forty members sing with
devoted passion. Kastalsky’s Christ
is Risen is bold and declamatory
whilst their singing of Chesnokov’s
Bless the Lord, O My Soul has
a grave nobility to it. Svirdov takes
the same hymn as Rachmaninov (Rejoice,
O Virgin) and constructs
a setting of compact exultation. Austere
or rich each setting embodies great
and concentrated power, with bass Andre
Papkov adding his powerful contributions
to expressive effect, the downward extensions
hewn as if from the clay itself. I admired
the melismatic sopranos in Sacred
Love from the second of Sviridov’s
Three Choruses (part of the incidental
music for Tolstoy’s play Tsar
Feodor Ioannovich – and impressive
music at that) as I did the Znamenny
monophonic chant Lord, I call in
which the dynamic implications are securely
followed. Bortniansky follows the sacred
concerto, an Italian importation, and
does so with a good grasp of its compact
fluorescence and also its mellow reflectiveness.
The three stanzas are set with real
flair and understanding of the stylistic
and evocative potential of the texts
and it makes for an emotionally satisfying
mid point in the recital, one which
points to the internalization of (relatively)
florid external models by native Russian
composers.
There is real austere
nobility, a defining gravity, in Smolensky’s
All of Creation Rejoices,
an arrangement of a Chant melody
sung at the festive Liturgy of St Basil
the Great and Smolensky’s influence
on Grechaninov and Rachmaninov in terms
of sacred composition is undeniable.
The exchanges between Deacon and the
choral responses exemplified by Arkhangelsky’s
Litany of Supplication – those
responses frequently and idiomatically
softened – are impressively done as
is the final piece, Nikolai Kedrov’s
Our Father a work of affecting
delicacy.
The booklet prints
transliterated Russian texts with English
translations and gives a few descriptive
sentences of each work. The Choir has
done themselves and their source material
proud.
Jonathan Woolf
Andre Papkov (bass)