It’s amazing how two composers who were born only a year apart (1934 and 1935), lived only about 1,00o miles from each other in the same country (the Soviet Union), and both understood so well how to write for chorus in a way that’s both satisfying to hear and to sing, could produce works that are so different from each other.
Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Mass is spare and crystalline, sounding at once ancient and modern. Its spaciousness is that of the outdoors on a cold, crisp winter day in Estonia. The horizon is endless.
Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir is also spacious, but it’s the spaciousness of a huge cathedral, with centuries of echoing voices trapped and overlapping each other, then coming together suddenly in a big, bold and painfully beautiful consonant chord. It’s so Soviet, so Russian.
Bonnie
-CH
flaneur82
exploigorsky
Mary Beth
caradmer
Majie
Mary MacDonald
