A Suppressed Holy Week From the Former Soviet Union

The BBC Music Magazine has chosen The Clarion Choir's recording of Maximilian Steinburg's Passion Week from Naxos as its Choral Recording of the Month for December 2016 and provides an excerpt here. Providing some background, conductor Steven Fox writes:

My dear colleague Barbara Mouk had been telling me about Passion Week since I first met her in 2004. Her father, the Russian- American conductor Igor Buketoff, had given her the score shortly before he passed away. The composer of the piece, Maximilian Steinberg, was the prized student of Rimsky-Korsakov, and eventually became not only his son-in-law, but also his successor on the composition faculty of the St Petersburg Conservatory.

Steinberg composed Passion Week in secret over a three year period, 1920-23, when the Bolsheviks had just banned sacred music, so it was never performed. Barbara explained to me that she believed Shostakovich, who was Steinberg’s student, had brought the piece over to the US on one of his trips here, hoping there might be a choir here that could finally perform the piece.

But Maestro Buketoff had trouble finding an American choir that was adept at singing in Church Slavonic. So he eventually handed the mission off to Barbara, and Barbara took it to me. But I must admit that I also was (shamefully!) slow to take on the project. During my first years working with Clarion, we were almost exclusively focused on performing Baroque and Classical music. But in more recent years, we expanded into later periods, particularly with The Clarion Choir. As our repertoire started to take this new direction, Barbara re-approached me about Passion Week and said - 'you have no reason not to give this piece a serious look now!' And I am so thankful to her that she did. The piece is extraordinary, and, in my mind, deserving of a special place in the Russian choral repertoire.

The style of the work combines the rich vocal scoring and luscious Romantic palette one associates with Rachmaninov's choral works, but it also adds more modern elements of style: there are times when the rich vocal texture reverts hauntingly to a single voice and then into stark silence. The silences between phrases are a critical part of the piece, as we learned in performing and recording it. They add a sense of contemplativeness that I believe comes directly out of the Holy Week plainchants upon which the work is based.

There is another recording of this work available too:

Cappella Romana has even issued a deluxe vinyl recording!

Burning Books and Remembering

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is often read as a story about censorship--yet censorship usually means that certain ideas may not be expressed. The Firemen in Bradbury's dystopia burn ALL books--it's the media that's marked for destruction, not necessarily the message. Books symbolize a way of thinking, trying to understand, wanting to communicate, publishing to preserve knowledge that those in control could not allow. They replaced books with mindless entertainment--big screen walls and faux-interactive "reality shows". As Bradbury said, "You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them." Behind Bradbury's book is a whole idea of culture--the kind of culture represented by books and education but also by the world Clarisse tells Montag about. She and her family are trying to hold on to a life of thinking and talking about ideas and loving nature--sitting on front porches in rocking chairs enjoying a garden. Montag doesn't recognize that world at all. His wife Mildred is totally absorbed in the meaningless imagery of The Family--yet she cannot even tell him what happens during a day of sitting in a room with three wall screens (which is not enough for her--she demands the fourth wall be covered with a screen). There is nothing permanent in this entertainment; it numbs the brain as much as Mildred's sleeping pills numb her body. And then the war comes and the city is pulverized.

There are two passages in the novel that, not surprisingly, reminded me of the issues of the English Reformation. One is very obvious: Mrs. Hudson, immolating herself among her books, quoting the famous statement of Bishop Latimer to Bishop Ridley: "Be of good comfort, and play the man, Master Ridley; we shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." (Our source for this is Foxe's Acts and Monuments, in a later edition, after the first edition indicated that no one knew about either man's last words before being burned to death in Oxford on October 16, 1555).[Timing, eh?]

The other is more indirect: the situation of the men in the woods who describe to Montag how they have memorized books and are holding on to the memory of primarily western culture to pass it on to their children. This underground memory culture reminds me of Catholic recusants, passing on memories of their English Catholic heritage: "We'll pass the books on to our children, by word of mouth, and let our children wait, in turn, on the other people. . . ." Those underground Catholics of the 16th and 17th and 18th centuries prepared for the revival of Catholicism in England during the 19th and 20th, maintaining their knowledge and practice of the Faith the best they could, even with some losses, until public worship, and buildings, and schools and colleges, the structures of education and culture could be restored and rebuilt.

I suppose a rather troublesome sequel to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 would come with the restoration of libraries, schools, and institutions of higher learning--then the dispersed unity of those who have memorized the books would have to come together. They would have to organize and accept their places in a hierarchy and a system to rebuild and restore. Perhaps a little like the Catholic community in England during the 19th century?