CHRIST IS RISEN!

Today's episode of "Icons in Sound" features two beautiful CDs, both of which originate in Ekaterinburg, in the Ural mountain region of Russia. Thanks to a very fortuitous collaboration between the two monastic communities responsible for producing the CDs and the academic and artistic community-an extremely rare phenomenon in the Orthodox world-Ekaterinburg has emerged as a place where the liturgical arts, and particularly liturgical music, are cultivated with extraordinary zeal and on a very high level of excellence. The choir of Sisters of the Novo-Tikhvinsky Monastery is coached by one of the faculty members of the conservatory choral department, while the men's choir of the Monastery of the All-Merciful Savior has as its consultant and member, Maestro Valery Kopanev, the Artistic Director and Conductor of the Domestik Municipal Choir of Ekaterinburg, one of the outstanding professional choral ensembles in Russia today.

In his Epistle to the Galatians (3:28), St. Paul tells us that in the Church "there is neither Jew nor Greek...,"  nor, we might add, Slav or Arab or American, "for are all one in Christ Jesus." As true as this saying is, in our parishes here in America, every leader of church singing or choir director has to make concrete choices about the style of liturgical singing that is used in the community: will it be "Greek," or "Russian," or of some other Old-World nationality? As more and more Orthodox missions spread out across the North American landscape, the likelihood is great that any given parish will include people of many different nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, including converts. In the first part of this program we feature a CD, entitled Resurrection! by Archangel Voices (I-70), that explores how two different musical traditions -- the Byzantine chant tradition and the tradition of harmonized choral singing that came to this country from Russia and other Eastern Slavic lands -- can both be adapted into English and integrated within a single liturgical service, in this instance, the Matins of Pascha.

This program showcases a CD that came out just before Pascha in 2007 -- Russian composer Alexandre Gretchaninoff's Passion Week, as recorded on the Chandos label by the Kansas City Chorale and the Phoenix Bach Choir, under the direction of Charles Bruffy. This superb recording was nominated for five Grammy awards, including Best Classical Album and Best Choral Performance, and it ended up winning one Grammy for Best Engineered Classical Album. The CD got absolutely glowing reviews in a number of magazines and periodicals, which gave wide exposure to Orthodox church music in a positive light. Read two of the best reviews here and here. 

Certain circumstances make this particular recording quite dear to my heart. I had occasion to work with as a consultant with the Kansas City Chorale and its enormously talented conductor, Charles Bruffy, in the mid-1990s, when they recorded Sergei Rachmaninoff's Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Here was a major American choral conductor with a serious interest in the music of the Orthodox Church. Ever since the success of that project, Charles would ask me from time to time, "What else is there in the Orthodox choral repertoire that we should perform and record?' So a few years ago I gave him the score of Gretchaninoff's Passion Week which our publishing company, Musica Russica had published. After "living with the score" for a while, as conductors will often do, Charles decided to program the Passion Week, first in concerts in Phoenix and Kansas City, and then as a recording project.