In the darkest days of the pandemic, as I was sitting at home, it occurred to me that 2023 would be a significant year the 150th anniversary of Rachmaninov's I birth. Would I live to see another anniversary of such importance? Perhaps if I lived to 90! So, I thought to myself, "If we ever get though this, I'm going to celebrate properly."
Steven Fox, music director of New York's Clarion Choir, is speaking to me in a restaurant just a stone's throw away from 505 West End Avenue, the stately New York apartment where Rachmaninov and his wife Natalia eventually settled after fleeing the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Fox is telling me about his very special project for 2023 - to conduct all of Rachmaninov's major choral works. 'I had no worries that orchestras would celebrate the symphonies and that pianists would perform the concertos, but so little attention is given to his choral works in general,' he continues, and they were his favourite works. The two works he was most proud of at the end of his life were the All Night Vigil and The Bells - he even requested that part of the Vigil be sung at his funeral.'
Fox is a Russian music specialist, having studied the Russian language at school and at university - and subsequently making several trips to St Petersburg and Moscow during his tertiary studies at New England's Dartmouth College and London's Royal Academy of Music. The first time he heard Russian spoken by a teacher at his New York high school, he fell in love with its 'dark and mysterious sounds' and instantly gave up French so he could immerse himself in the exotic and captivating dialect.
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من BBC Music Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك ? تسجيل الدخول
هذه القصة مأخوذة من طبعة April 2023 من BBC Music Magazine.
ابدأ النسخة التجريبية المجانية من Magzter GOLD لمدة 7 أيام للوصول إلى آلاف القصص المتميزة المنسقة وأكثر من 9,000 مجلة وصحيفة.
بالفعل مشترك? تسجيل الدخول
Discovering Donizetti - Thanks to a two-year lockdown project, nearly 200 previously lost Donizetti songs will now see the light of day
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As we get older do we respond differently to that vast canon of music dealing with mortality? Is it inevitably true that, as we journey through the decades, we are better able to interpret or empathise with a profoundly death-obsessed masterpiece such as Schubert's Winterreise? Or do human beings possess such a flexible sense of empathy that we can relate to virtually any state of mind if it is evoked convincingly enough by a composer?
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