Russian resolve
Peter Phillips
Over the years I have met some unusual obstacles to my selfappointed task of spreading interest in unaccompanied singing around the globe. The main one is that music without instruments doesn’t have any ‘musicians’ in it and therefore cannot be taken seriously. Another is that church music which is not by Bach falls into a different, less professional category from normal concert music and therefore cannot be taken seriously. But in Moscow last week I met a new problem: all the current professors at the Conservatoire who might be involved in teaching unaccompanied singing were trained in the Soviet period, when the only acceptable music in this genre was patriotic songs. The current students clearly want to move on from this tradition but there are few people to show them how. It became apparent that ‘Lenin vsegda s toboy’ (Lenin is always with you) and ‘Shiroka strana moya rodnaya’ (My spacious homeland) were not ideal preparations for singing Byrd and Gibbons, but at least these songs had created a thirst for something else. Anything else, really.
Eventually I gave a concert in the Anglican church with a choir which consisted entirely of conducting students. It was a beautiful occasion, the acoustics of the church helping no end. I was surprised and impressed by the sound, though anyone with even a passing knowledge of Moscow would have known what to expect, since for many years this church was the recording studio of Melodiya. Between 1920 and 1991 the building had been confiscated, and it was really only as a result of a visit to Moscow by the Queen in 1994 that Yeltsin gave permission for services to take place again — once a fortnight on Sundays. Melodiya, with contacts all over the political landscape, took a lot of removing, a task which was only completed by the present incumbent, Canon Simon Stephens, in 2006. Before that, services had had to share the space with recording booms in the church and pile upon pile of old black vinyls blocking up all the entrances and porches: no doubt a dream situation for any collector of rare discs. But what had started the hand-back of the buildings in the Anglican compound was Yeltsin’s apparent disquiet at the use to which the Soviets had put the adjoining parsonage: housing a printing press churning out pornography for the politburo. There was a concern that the Queen, whose visit was already planned, might not like it. The choir I worked with is called Intrada and was formed by Ekaterina Antonenko. She says with pride that they are the only group in Russia to specialise in Renaissance polyphony, a claim which always makes me go watery but which in this context, in a country which had no renaissance as a cultural period and was still under the yoke of the Tatars for some of the 16th century, seems almost incredible. Of course they can sing — this was something the Soviets had encouraged — though the lower voices, altos as much as basses, do seem to fare better in Russian ensembles than the higher ones. But looking round the Conservatory, with its cast of elderly professors, I was impressed that such an intense determination to perform this repertoire could come from one of their students.
It is true that in every conservatoire in the Western world there is still an awkwardness between the singing faculties and their so-called early music departments, each rejecting the other with righteous indignation, but in Moscow the problem looks to be more acute. To be fair, though, despite my visit being bruited in advance by muzblog magazine with the slogan ‘Welcome news for all lovers and authentic executants of ancient European vocal music’ the Director rolled out the red carpet when I arrived, giving me a set of recordings, held uniquely in the Conservatoire’s sound archive, of David Oistrakh playing in the Fifties: they are celebrating the centenary of his birth. I wondered if any of this archive had been housed in the porch of the Anglican church.
One of the reliable pleasures of visiting the Moscow Conservatory is to follow the posthumous career of Sir Arnold Bax. Without fail there is a concert of Bax being advertised, and indeed this time there was an extra-large banner over the main entrance, right on cue. Sometimes it is Bax with Vivaldi or Corelli or Handel; sometimes just J.S. Bax is trumpeted. For years now an old Russia hand and I have been wondering what Bax did with all the royalties he must have accrued while still alive, during the Soviet period. He would not have been able to get them out of the country, so one must imagine him and his family holidaying in the Crimea — not quite the Celtic countryside he loved, but no doubt inspiring, even if for some reason he doesn’t seem to have written a Black Sea Tintagel. ❑
Olden but golden
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