New Classical Tracks: Ravishingly Russian - Houston Chamber Choir

Robert Simpson first captured the spirit of Russian choral music from his Russian wife Marianna Parnas Simpson. But tracking down scores for what would become the new recording of his Houston Chamber Choir, a disc called "Ravishingly Russian," turned out to be a stumbling block. Simpson turned to Marianna who immediately got in touch with a former professor at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, "So my friends and colleagues went to the warehouse," Marianna recalls, "and they shipped me a pack of music that Bob and I played through and picked the ones we liked the best.

The Houston Chamber Choir was founded in 1995 by Robert Simpson. The choir has explored a wide range of music from Renaissance to Romantic, from classical to Jazz. Simpson says delving into secular Russian choral music has been truly rewarding, "Never had we taken on the awesome responsibility of coming to terms with a culture and a musical sensitivity beyond our own. To me that was one of our greatest challenges. And when I hear those who know Russian choral music say you've captured the spirit, it is the greatest compliment we can receive."

The text for each song on this recording is based on Russian poetry. One of Marianna Simpson's favorites is, "The Unknown Lady." It's based on a poem by Alexander Blok which Marianna had to memorize while in grade school. To this day she still loves to recite it. When she heard these familiar words combined with the music written by Yuri Falik, a popular Russian composer of today, she suddenly heard this familiar poem in a new light, "And then I heard the Falik music that he composed and it was like a tango, and I thought, that doesn't sound good at all. It broke my own image of the enchanting beauty of this lady wearing this silky dress. But then we started singing it and it kind of sank in and I began to like it. It's just another view."

Many of these Russian secular part-songs address the beauty and the violence of the Russian Landscape. Robert Simpson explains how that theme is depicted in Sergei Taneyev's, "The Ruins of the Tower."

Robert Simpson says, "the text talks about the great crag that looks down upon the poet's vantage point. There's a deep sadness as he feels himself removed from life. And this is really brought to great focus in the music itself, but it's a text you would not find so often in other traditions. The Russian soul is deep and it's somewhat taken with the kind of reactions to love and loss and nature. One of the things that was clear to me as I started to get into this is how well matched the text and the music is. " Simpson adds that, "very often choral music will have strong music, but the text will be mediocre. Or there will be strong texts and the music isn't as strong as it should be, but in Russian music, there's a wedding of beauty in poetry and in music that makes it a remarkable experience both for the performer and for the listener."

As you might imagine, it wasn't easy learning how to sing in Russian. But once Robert Simpson and the members of the Houston Chamber Choir fell in love with the songs, Simpson says they were all more than willing to endure what Marianna called her Russian boot camp.

"All of these pieces have mountainous texts and there's very little repetition, so with the love of the music, and the dedication to this project, the wonderful musicians of the Houston Chamber Choir just sat and listened to Marianna repeat over and over again the texts until we came to a point where most of the Russians who hear this CD think it sounds very good."

You don't need to understand the language to get lost in the beauty of these rarely heard Russian songs of nature, love and loss.

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