St Petersburg, Concert Hall

Shchedrin. The Sealed Angel
Prokofiev. Alexander Nevsky

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PERFORMERS:
Soloists:
Olga Borodina (mezzo-soprano)
Nikita Kaminsky (discant)
Alexander Zhuravsky (alto)
Sofia Viland (flute)

The Mariinsky Chorus and Orchestra
Conductors: Konstantin Rylov, Pavel Smelkov


PROGRAMME:
Rodion Shchedrin
The Sealed Angel, choral music after Nikolai Leskov

Sergei Prokofiev
Alexander Nevsky, cantata


Musical Preparation: Marina Mishuk
Concert Master: Alla Brosterman

About the Concert

“This Angel was in truth too wonderful to describe. His countenance, as I now see it, seemed shining with divinity and readiness to help; his glance compassionate; his little ears were pointed as if ever ready to hearken; his vesture shone and his tunic seemed powdered with gold; wings sprang from his shoulders, he wore a girdle; on his breast was the face of the babe Emmanuel; a cross in his right hand and in his left a fiery sword. Wonderful, wonderful! The locks on his dear little head were curly, and auburn, winding beneath his ears, and every hair painted as if with a needle, and every curl nestled against the next curl.”

Thus does the protagonist from Nikolai Leskov’s tale The Sealed Angel (1872) describe an icon particularly revered by an artel of masonic Old Believers. Leskov’s wondrous lexis with its incomparably colourful intonation inspired Rodion Shchedrin to compose a Sealed Angel of his own (1988). “Here there are no direct plot links with the literary source,” the composer has explained, “but the most important idea, in my opinion, of Leskov of the incorruptibility of artistic beauty, of the magical and lofty power of art is feasibly interpreted by means of musical language. Here and there, onto the pages of his story Leskov scatters the first lines taken from hymns of the Old Believers, the literary texts of which have been, in part, set to my music.”

The Sealed Angel by Shchedrin emerged in the thousand-year anniversary of Christianity arriving in Rus’ of Old, though the anniversary date itself was not the principal guiding stimulus that compelled the composer, the grandson of a priest, to respond to “the call of the heart”, and in just one month to produce a score that he later came to call a “Russian liturgy”. At the turn of the 1980s-90s, the country “printed out” – acquiring once more – this jewel of its religious and spiritual tradition. In churches that reopened after long years of lying in ruins, church choruses could be heard. But Shchedrin was not composing for a choir; the emotional experience felt by someone in a church is something he brings to the concert hall. In translation from the Greek, “liturgy” means “shared service”, and through this “shared service” the composer offers the purification of the soul by means of singing in a choir and listening to a choir.

The choral writing in The Sealed Angel is unusually diverse and varied, with its sources lying in Russian folklore, as well as in Russian divine worship customs from several centuries, and also in the musical avant-garde of the 20th century. In combining the styles of early Russian anthem singing and the multi-voice church singing of the New Age (from partes to Rachmaninoff and Chesnokov), by employing musical means Shchedrin expresses the core thought behind Leskov’s story – the idea of reuniting the proponents of old and new rites, the Old Believers and the Nikonites, and – in a broader sense – the idea of national unity.

The gold, the blue of the sky and the whiteness shimmering in the miracle-working icon of the guardian angel are things that Shchedrin has succeeded in bringing to his music, which radiates an unearthly light. It is symbolic that The Sealed Angel is to be performed at the Mariinsky Theatre for the first time on 25 December, when many, many Christians throughout the world will be celebrating Christmas Day. Khristina Batyushina


The cantata Alexander Nevsky was composed on the basis of music for the eponymous film by Sergei Eisenstein which was released in 1938. The exceptional success that accompanied the film, comparable to that of Chapaev, allowed Prokofiev to create a work independent from the film music and take it to the stage of the concert hall, changing almost nothing in it apart from several details of the orchestration.
The “picture-like” and “visible” nature of the images is one of the typical features of Prokofiev’s music in general and of this work in particular. It is as if the audience “sees” what is happening onstage, even if behind the musical impressions there is no sense of watching a cinema film. In the structure of the cantata itself one can detect features of a symphonic poem in which the first movement is a prologue and the second and third are an exposition that embodies two opposing forces: that of the Russian heroes (represented by Alexander) and that of the Order of Livonian Knights. The fourth and fifth movements form a section in which the fifth movement – the battle scene on Lake Chudskoe – is the undoubted peak and central piece of the cantata as a whole. The sixth movement is an episode of lament for fallen warriors, the only solo section (for mezzo-soprano) in the entire work. And lastly there is the seventh movement – the finale, a reprise, the celebration and triumph of the Russian warriors who are victorious. Pavel Velikanov

Age category 6+

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