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From Russia with love
by Steve Rzasa
It took three years of extensive planning and fund-raising, but 80 local people were finally able to sing in — and to — the heart of Russia this summer.
The Downeast Singers, along with the Bowdoin Choir, toured the Russian Far East June 24 to July 9.
Tony Antolini of Cushing, conductor of both groups, published the first modern edition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” in 1988, and eight years later the Down East Singers and the Bowdoin Choir recorded the music for Bison Records. The music had been out of print for many years.
Antolini explained that he had taken “Liturgy” on a Russian tour in the winter of 1987-88. The tour, however, did not go beyond the European cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev.
“It was always a dream of mine to see Siberia and the Far East,” he said.
So, after three years of working with a San Francisco travel agency and raising grant money to pay part of the expenses, the singers were ready to go to Siberia. Even with the grants, each traveler had to pay $3,500.
During this summer’s tour, singers put on six different performances, each of which started off with eight different American selections, such as “There is a Balm in Gilead” by William L. Dawson, “The Waking” by David Conte and “Let Me Fly,” a traditional African-American spiritual. The group’s Russian repertoire consisted of Rachmaninoff’s “Liturgy.”
When the singers arrived in Moscow, they found high school students all over the city celebrating graduation, according to Becky Clapp of Rockport, who took the trip with her 10-year-old son. All the local schools graduated at the same time, so they got together and paraded across Red Square. Their procession was followed by fireworks show over the Moscow River.
The singers left late on June 26 for Novosibirsk, a small city in the central portion of Russia. The group made their temporary home at the Hotel Siberia.
Novosibirsk means New Siberia. It was founded in the 1950s as a planned community, a manufacturing and educational center for the region. It is somewhat a somber sight, with most of its buildings in the stark gray concrete block style of the Soviet era. The city was the site of the singers’ first Russian concert, in the local philharmonic hall.
Singer Kit Pfeiffer of Searsmont, who works with Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, described the hall as very ornate, with Greek-style columns and large portraits of famous musicians, and compared it to the concert halls in Boston or Philadelphia.
It was the Thomaston-based singers’ first hint at just how grand a reception the Russian people had prepared for their entourage.
“These were not just backyard venues,” Clapp said. “These were the best and the brightest.”
An audience of between 500 to 600 people packed the hall for the performance. The audience was lavish in its applause, and the group was prompted to perform encores. This scene repeated itself across Russia as the tour progressed.
“We routinely did three or four encores,” Pfeiffer said. “I was just delighted by the warm reception.”
While in the city, Pfeiffer visited the Glinka Conservatory and spoke with the director about arranging an exchange program with Bay Chamber Concerts during its summer camp.
The next day, the singers boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad for a 30-hour journey to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, the deepest body of freshwater in the world.
Susan Silverio of Lincolnville Center met a 12-year-old student who was traveling the entire length of the railroad — from Moscow to Khabarovsk, a week-long trek. He was happy to practice his English by speaking with the Americans.
“We saluted him with a song, and he sang the national anthem for us,” Silverio said.
Upon arrival in Irkutsk, the group took a brief bus tour and Silverio asked the Russian guide if they could go see a local church. They were told several times they could not go, but eventually they found a bus and rode out to the church. An old woman met the bus and, although anxious at first, brought them into the church, even though she said it could get her in trouble. Silverio said the woman later recited some of her own poetry for the visitors.
“It felt to me like this very deep and rich soul of the Russian people was opened,” Silverio said.
Part of the reason the woman felt more at ease was the friendship that young John Clapp formed with her 10-year-old grandson, Kirill Andreavich Nikiforvna, who lives in a small yurt, or traditional dwelling, with his grandmother near the church.
Nikiforvna was able to get some sense of what Maine is like from postcards that Kathy Pease of West Rockport had brought along. By the time the side trip was concluded, the boys had exchanged addresses and posed for a photograph together.
Irkutsk lies 40 miles down the Angara River from the lake, which contains species of fish and freshwater seals found nowhere else in the world, Pfeiffer said. One brave member of the group, Susan St. John of Owls Head, an instructor at Hurricane Island Outward Bound, dared to take a dip in the frigid waters. Pfeiffer was not so brave.
“I dipped my toe in, and then put my shoe back on and couldn’t feel it,” she said.
From Irkutsk, the group took a flight of several hundred miles on July 2 to reach Khabarovsk, a city perched on the Chinese border, not far from the northern Pacific Ocean. The singers’ visit to this remote region of the old Soviet Far East was well received.
“The people were delighted to see us,” Clapp said, adding that the last musical group to perform there was a 12-member church group more than a decade ago.
Indeed, when they first arrived, local officials were present with three girls dressed in traditional Russian Orthodox garb, with bread and salt, which they presented the visitors with in a brief ceremony.
“We were told the Fourth of July had been declared a holiday and work had been canceled in Khabarovsk,” Silverio said.
The singers performed the next day in a philharmonic hall, similar to that in Novosibirsk, and were scheduled to sing again July 4 on the steps of a cathedral in town. That performance, however, was rained out, so the American singers got together with two Russian choirs in an unlikely place — the Russian officers’ club in Lenin Square, a large structure that once served as a mayor’s mansion for the city.
The celebration was broadcast on local television. The Americans sang several of their songs, including the Rachmaninoff pieces and patriotic tunes. Their performance was followed by that of the Chamber Choir of Khabarovsk, and another group from a nearby rural area. Pfeiffer was impressed by this group, whose members sang beautiful and complex tunes they had memorized.
At one point, they all sang the Russian national anthem. Clapp pointed out that, like Americans, some of the Russian people did not know all the words to their anthem. It is set to the same tune as the older Soviet national anthem, with new words composed by the same man who created the previous anthem.
Following the concerts, the hotel staff provided champagne and sparklers for the Americans. Pfeiffer said they spent the night singing tunes like “Yankee Doodle” and waving their sparklers about in celebration.
Clapp said that many of the stereotypes of Russia as a sinister sort of place were broken on this trip. The people exhibited a very positive attitude, despite the poor state of the economy and infrastructure in their country. Clapp also discovered many things she did not know about the Russian people, such as their 97 percent literacy rate and the fact that many are multilingual.
“I was always struck by how much people still tried to communicate with us, even though they knew we didn’t understand,” she said.
For Pfeiffer, it was the human contact that made the trip so special. She later went out to lunch with Natasha, the translator from the Glinka Conservatory, and enjoyed hearing about what her life is like.
“We had such respect and admiration for these people who had gone through so much economic and political change in their country and survived,” she said.
The Down East Singers will begin their new season next week.
It took three years of extensive planning and fund-raising, but 80 local people were finally able to sing in — and to — the heart of Russia this summer.
The Downeast Singers, along with the Bowdoin Choir, toured the Russian Far East June 24 to July 9.
Tony Antolini of Cushing, conductor of both groups, published the first modern edition of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom” in 1988, and eight years later the Down East Singers and the Bowdoin Choir recorded the music for Bison Records. The music had been out of print for many years.
Antolini explained that he had taken “Liturgy” on a Russian tour in the winter of 1987-88. The tour, however, did not go beyond the European cities of Moscow, St. Petersburg and Kiev.
“It was always a dream of mine to see Siberia and the Far East,” he said.
So, after three years of working with a San Francisco travel agency and raising grant money to pay part of the expenses, the singers were ready to go to Siberia. Even with the grants, each traveler had to pay $3,500.
During this summer’s tour, singers put on six different performances, each of which started off with eight different American selections, such as “There is a Balm in Gilead” by William L. Dawson, “The Waking” by David Conte and “Let Me Fly,” a traditional African-American spiritual. The group’s Russian repertoire consisted of Rachmaninoff’s “Liturgy.”
When the singers arrived in Moscow, they found high school students all over the city celebrating graduation, according to Becky Clapp of Rockport, who took the trip with her 10-year-old son. All the local schools graduated at the same time, so they got together and paraded across Red Square. Their procession was followed by fireworks show over the Moscow River.
The singers left late on June 26 for Novosibirsk, a small city in the central portion of Russia. The group made their temporary home at the Hotel Siberia.
Novosibirsk means New Siberia. It was founded in the 1950s as a planned community, a manufacturing and educational center for the region. It is somewhat a somber sight, with most of its buildings in the stark gray concrete block style of the Soviet era. The city was the site of the singers’ first Russian concert, in the local philharmonic hall.
Singer Kit Pfeiffer of Searsmont, who works with Bay Chamber Concerts in Rockport, described the hall as very ornate, with Greek-style columns and large portraits of famous musicians, and compared it to the concert halls in Boston or Philadelphia.
It was the Thomaston-based singers’ first hint at just how grand a reception the Russian people had prepared for their entourage.
“These were not just backyard venues,” Clapp said. “These were the best and the brightest.”
An audience of between 500 to 600 people packed the hall for the performance. The audience was lavish in its applause, and the group was prompted to perform encores. This scene repeated itself across Russia as the tour progressed.
“We routinely did three or four encores,” Pfeiffer said. “I was just delighted by the warm reception.”
While in the city, Pfeiffer visited the Glinka Conservatory and spoke with the director about arranging an exchange program with Bay Chamber Concerts during its summer camp.
The next day, the singers boarded the Trans-Siberian Railroad for a 30-hour journey to Irkutsk, near Lake Baikal, the deepest body of freshwater in the world.
Susan Silverio of Lincolnville Center met a 12-year-old student who was traveling the entire length of the railroad — from Moscow to Khabarovsk, a week-long trek. He was happy to practice his English by speaking with the Americans.
“We saluted him with a song, and he sang the national anthem for us,” Silverio said.
Upon arrival in Irkutsk, the group took a brief bus tour and Silverio asked the Russian guide if they could go see a local church. They were told several times they could not go, but eventually they found a bus and rode out to the church. An old woman met the bus and, although anxious at first, brought them into the church, even though she said it could get her in trouble. Silverio said the woman later recited some of her own poetry for the visitors.
“It felt to me like this very deep and rich soul of the Russian people was opened,” Silverio said.
Part of the reason the woman felt more at ease was the friendship that young John Clapp formed with her 10-year-old grandson, Kirill Andreavich Nikiforvna, who lives in a small yurt, or traditional dwelling, with his grandmother near the church.
Nikiforvna was able to get some sense of what Maine is like from postcards that Kathy Pease of West Rockport had brought along. By the time the side trip was concluded, the boys had exchanged addresses and posed for a photograph together.
Irkutsk lies 40 miles down the Angara River from the lake, which contains species of fish and freshwater seals found nowhere else in the world, Pfeiffer said. One brave member of the group, Susan St. John of Owls Head, an instructor at Hurricane Island Outward Bound, dared to take a dip in the frigid waters. Pfeiffer was not so brave.
“I dipped my toe in, and then put my shoe back on and couldn’t feel it,” she said.
From Irkutsk, the group took a flight of several hundred miles on July 2 to reach Khabarovsk, a city perched on the Chinese border, not far from the northern Pacific Ocean. The singers’ visit to this remote region of the old Soviet Far East was well received.
“The people were delighted to see us,” Clapp said, adding that the last musical group to perform there was a 12-member church group more than a decade ago.
Indeed, when they first arrived, local officials were present with three girls dressed in traditional Russian Orthodox garb, with bread and salt, which they presented the visitors with in a brief ceremony.
“We were told the Fourth of July had been declared a holiday and work had been canceled in Khabarovsk,” Silverio said.
The singers performed the next day in a philharmonic hall, similar to that in Novosibirsk, and were scheduled to sing again July 4 on the steps of a cathedral in town. That performance, however, was rained out, so the American singers got together with two Russian choirs in an unlikely place — the Russian officers’ club in Lenin Square, a large structure that once served as a mayor’s mansion for the city.
The celebration was broadcast on local television. The Americans sang several of their songs, including the Rachmaninoff pieces and patriotic tunes. Their performance was followed by that of the Chamber Choir of Khabarovsk, and another group from a nearby rural area. Pfeiffer was impressed by this group, whose members sang beautiful and complex tunes they had memorized.
At one point, they all sang the Russian national anthem. Clapp pointed out that, like Americans, some of the Russian people did not know all the words to their anthem. It is set to the same tune as the older Soviet national anthem, with new words composed by the same man who created the previous anthem.
Following the concerts, the hotel staff provided champagne and sparklers for the Americans. Pfeiffer said they spent the night singing tunes like “Yankee Doodle” and waving their sparklers about in celebration.
Clapp said that many of the stereotypes of Russia as a sinister sort of place were broken on this trip. The people exhibited a very positive attitude, despite the poor state of the economy and infrastructure in their country. Clapp also discovered many things she did not know about the Russian people, such as their 97 percent literacy rate and the fact that many are multilingual.
“I was always struck by how much people still tried to communicate with us, even though they knew we didn’t understand,” she said.
For Pfeiffer, it was the human contact that made the trip so special. She later went out to lunch with Natasha, the translator from the Glinka Conservatory, and enjoyed hearing about what her life is like.
“We had such respect and admiration for these people who had gone through so much economic and political change in their country and survived,” she said.
The Down East Singers will begin their new season next week.