Russian Sunday

    Since it's only fair to hit all of the bases I've been neglecting for awhile, I noticed I haven't written about Varsity Choir in a while so today has proven itself the right time to re-comment on that classic blog-filler of yore.  Today was "Russian Sunday" for the VC and I had a moment in which I actually felt transplanted (which is part of the reason I love music--it can do that to a person) into Red Square.  This music is really magical; our usual repertoire draws mostly from German, Austrian, and French composers--the usuals. Very often we sing in Latin. Here are some of my favorite pieces from the first week of the choir year (in September) when we were singing very early church pieces. (In the 2nd of these, the alto section has a solo...see if you can find it!) A couple Sundays ago we sang a pretty baroque mass--full of Handel, Haydn, Mozart--all the favorite classical pieces everyone's heard and can recognize. We recognize it because the sound is distinct and brilliant.  Very prim and proper sounding, neat and tidy, moving pretty fast--it can almost have a brassiness to it that's "delightful."  So, Russian Sunday was nearly the exact opposite of that...and I loved it.
    Tchaikovsky is probably the most generally famous Russian composer, but the music we did today (not his) was even darker, deep, and rich sounding--the bass section was literally rumbling.  I'm serious...rumbling.  Usually the entire choir sings with straight tones so that it sounds like a basic constant wall of sound--check this out for an example of the sound (although this is not a high baroque piece).  Today we sang with full vibrato (and it the alto section that begins to equal something that might come out of a woman named Brunhilda--even though that's technically German but you get the imagery).  This is really the dark chocolate of music to me.  It was so, so gratifying.  But here was the best and transformative part: one of the songs we sang in slovanic which is an antiquated Russian Orthodox language (with letters that look like they're turned backwards...that's right...our music was written in the cyrillic alphabet...I literally became Russian in one week...I have no idea what I was saying but I sounded like I did).  So as we're knee deep in this piece, singing in another language altogether, I was able to pry my mind away from the notes for a moment and our total sound was so different...it was almost as though the language let us assume the culture written into the music. We became Russian Orthodox, singing about the mysticism written into that world.  As soon as the clips are posted, I'll put them up here...I can't wait to hear them.
    (P.S.--the choir is about 30 people on any given Sunday...sometimes when I listen to these clips, I'm really amazed by that...)