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In the first of two Easter Sunday posts exploring the festival as seen from diverse viewpoints, Mahlerman looks eastwards.

With more than a millennium of Christianity behind them the Russian Easter (Pashka) is the single most important day in the Orthodox calendar.  Last year I played with a straight bat at Easter, staying with the usual suspects from the Western Canon.  This year I thought we might look East – in the main.

Although Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky were almost exact contemporaries, it was the lesser talent of Nikolai Andreivitch that exercised a spell upon the young Alexander Gretchaninov. As a member of The Five, and a noted teacher of composition, the teacher-student relationship between Rimsky and the young man soon developed into a deep and lasting friendship, only cut short by Rimsky’s death in 1908. I have to admit that Gretchaninov’s Opus 58, Passion Week, was unknown to me when I heard it first a couple of years ago, in the present recording.  What I can say is that it pretty much bowled me over with its intensity, and the fact that the performers were American, not Russian, doubled my amazement. Here are the Kansas City Chorale in the sixth part of thirteen, Now the Powers of Heaven.

A glance at the high forehead and aristocratic bearing of Leopold Stokowski might persuade you that his origins were Russian, but in fact he was brought up in London’s East End by an Irish mother who had married a Polish cabinet-maker. From this unpromising start he built a spectacular career, first as an organist, and later a conductor and ‘arranger’. Most of the music in today’s post is pared-down to its essentials; Stokey’s trick was to lay it on thick – with a trowel. We hear it in Disney’s Fantasia, of course, but he made a speciality of taking the Lutheran J S Bach, and removing what the Germans call innig – the character of the domestic, the personal – and piling-on the instrumentation and, in the process,  becoming a master-manipulator of texture; every orchestra he trained, produced a wonderful, burnished patina.  Here is the Sydney Symphony Orchestra (sounding like the Berlin Philharmonic – he had that skill, too), playing the Chorale from the Easter Cantata, BWV 4.

Stokey was but a twinkle in his father’s eye when Tchaikovsky wrote his Liturgy of St John Chrysostom in 1879. The great Russian had already emerged from his disastrous marriage, and was entering a particularly fertile period that would see the birth of his fourth symphony, the violin concerto, and the opera Evgenii Onegin. His letters express an interest in theism, but it is fair to say that at no time in his life did he show what might be described as religious inflammation. All the more surprising then, to come across the extraordinary intensity of the Hymn of the Crerubim from the Liturgy.

This extraordinary and beautiful work has an interesting history.  Invited by the Cathedral Chapter of Cadiz to compose some music for the three-hour Good Friday service, Josef Haydn produced eight slow movements including the Introduction, and a pulsating Presto movement to conclude, representing the earthquake and rending of the Veil of the Temple. Originally, the Seven Last Words from the Cross was written for orchestra alone, but it was subsequently arranged in the version we hear today, for string quartet, and later still a version for chorus and orchestra appeared.

Although more than half his life was lived in the 20th Century, Sergei Rachmaninov remained, in his heart, an idealistic aristocrat, with leanings toward the highly perfumed world of the Russian country house – the world so well set out by Turgenev, where things stay the same, and gentlemanly virtues still have meaning and value. As were many of his kind, Rachmaninov was driven out of his homeland by the 1917 revolution, moving first to Finland and, a year later, to America, where his staggering keyboard skills brought him worldwide fame – and misery, as he felt that his constant touring drained his creative powers. His music has a yearning sadness and beauty that only a Puritan could fail to respond to, and this is well demontrated here, in the grave beauty of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, from which we hear The Mercy of Peace, the eleventh of twenty movements.  The fitting backdrop is the amazing Baroque and Neoclassical Church of Our Saviour on Spilt Blood in St Petersburg (top).