48782 LPO Schnittke.qxp:48782 LPO Schnittke
ALFRED SCHNITTKE (1934-1998) Three Sacred Songs O Holy Virgin, rejoice O Lord, Jesus Christ Our Father in Heaven Schnittke is said to have composed these three choruses, in the general style of Russian Orthodox church music, during a single night, though the year is given as 1983 or 1984 in different sources. They are much simpler in style than the Choral Concerto, but are also dedicated to Valery Polyansky.
RODION SHCHEDRIN (born 1932) Tsarskaya Kravchaya Pugachev’s Execution, Op. 61 Rodion Shchedrin was born in Moscow: his father was a violinist and composer who taught at the Moscow Conservatory, where Shchedrin studied from 1950 to 1955 and where he himself taught from 1965 to 1969. He succeeded Shostakovich as the chairman of the Russian Union of Composers and has developed a reputation as a politically independent, cosmopolitan creative artist. Since the break-up of the USSR he has divided his time between Moscow and Munich. Shchedrin has worked in most media and his output includes operas (notably Lolita after the novel by Vladimir Nabokov and Dead Souls after Gogol), ballets (notably Anna Karenina after Tolstoy), symphonies, concertos, piano and chamber works. Shchedrin is married to Maya Plisetskaya, a famous prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Ballet, and has written many works for her, including the brilliant Carmen Suite, probably his most famous work although it is founded on the music of Bizet.
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with Russian musical traditions from before the Soviet period, and this is especially true of his choral music, which includes the large-scale cycle The Sealed Angel (1988) setting Russian Orthodox texts. On 2 October 2008 his Golden Wedding Anniversary to Maya Plisetskaya was celebrated in the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory, on which occasion a new set of Two Russian Choruses was premièred. Tsarskaya Kravchaya is the first of these, and is adapted from Shchedrin’s choral opera The Life and Sufferings of Boyarina Morozova and Her Sister Princess Urusova, composed in 2006, which concerns the religious conflicts and schism in the Russian Orthodox Church that began in the 17th century with the rise of the Old Believers. In this opera, which uses only a few instruments, the choir functions as both narrator and orchestra. The dramatic choral poem Pugachev’s Execution sets a text by Alexander Pushkin from his narrative The History of Pugachev about the serious peasant and Old Believer rebellion against the government of Catherine the Great led by the Cossack Emelyan Pugachev in 1774-75. Shchedrin’s work was premièred in Tallinn, Estonia in 1983.
Above, members of the Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatory
Chamber Choir of the Moscow Conservatory Sopranos Bibigul Alibekova, Maria Chernetsova, Evgenia Eltysheva, Liudmila Eryutkina, Elena Kalchenko, Yulia Kletnova, Anastasia Mezhina, Maria Minaeva, Irina Mikhaylova, Margarita Pozhinaylo, Elena Romanova, Anna Shaverdyan, Ekaterina Siromakha, Olga Vlasova Altos Elmira Akchurina, Elena Bevz, Maria Chelmakina, Tatiana Korobkova, Evgeniya Krivitskaya, Ekaterina Levshenkova, Kristina Mal’tseva, Olga Minaeva, Alena Parfenova, Natalia Romanova, Svetlana Solovyeva, Natalia Telkova, Ekaterina Tolstoguzova Tenors Dmitry Antonov, Pavel Chernov, Yaroslav Gloushakov, Vasily Frolov, Denis Khanzhov, Sergey Sidorenko, Alexey Vereshchagin, Evgeny Volkov, Alexey Vyaznikov, Taras Yasenkov, Alexander Zyuzlikov
Malcolm MacDonald © 2009 Basses Miroslav Georgievskiy, Denis Dronov, Alexander Dolgopolov, Andrey Kaplanov, El’dar Musin, Denis Osmanov, Andrey Pavlenko, Armen Pogosyan, Alexander Solovyev, Aliaksandr Stvol, Ivan Uryupin, Vladimir Vishnevskiy, Dmitry Volkov, Mikhail Zaraev
In much of his more recent work Shchedrin is concerned to re-connect www.lpo.org.uk/schnittkewww.l po.org.uk/schnittke
19 November Concert
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