Sts Cyril and Methodius Orthodox Institute
26 Sep 07: Read a concert review from a Victorian newspaper
Russian voices echo a vast landscape
John Slavin, Reviewer
September 25, 2007
There is a late Fassbinder film in which a composer is locked in a soundproof room by his enemies. The torture they devise is to play the song Lili Marlene over and over again until he goes mad. I dreaded something similar in the one concert that the male a cappella ensemble from the Sretensky Cathedral in Moscow gave at St Paul’s.
It was the memory of visits by the Red Army Choir during the Cold War with dull liturgy added that aroused dread. I needn’t have worried.
The 40-member choir offers a cleverly chosen program that shifts moods from contemplative to reverent, from exuberant to ethnographic. The sound they make rises and falls like the waves of wind that race across the vast Russian steppes. The steppes in fact play a formative part in their repertoire: Ah the Steppes So Wide and The Steppe is all Around create moody landscapes aching with nostalgia for a lost homeland and are ironically evocative of the heroic era of Russian filmmaking in the 1950s. Later the steppes become the musical setting for wartime violence.
As one would expect, there is a strong folk element, which incorporates traditional dance rhythms and love songs like Shine On, My Star that give opportunities to soloists singing against the choral harmony. Chief of these was a bass, Dmitry Beloselsky. The power and masculine beauty of his register was nothing short of sensational. When a tenor called Anton Sergeev, who looks like a young Alain Delon, sang the classic Moscow Nights, there was not a dry eye in the capacity audience.
Under conductor Nikon Zhila, the quality of their singing is enhanced by the flexible sweetness of the young tenors underpinned by their growling basses. Their legato and the polish at the end of each phrase is flawless. They make an entire anthem out of a final alleluia.
There is only one word to describe the clarity with which each voice sits and sings within the communal body of sound: thrilling.
Source: The Age