The First of the Season

The first open concert of the season by the chamber choir of the Gorky Choral Society (artistic director Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR L. Sivukhin) took place in the concert and dance hall of the Kulibin Park of Culture and Leisure.

The programme of the evening was interesting: half of it consisted of works by the composers Kasyanov and the Gorky composers B. Getselev, L. Sivukhin and A. Nesterov, and Russian folk songs recorded in our region.

Thanks to this collective, almost all of them have become well known to Gorky music lovers, especially lovers of choral music.

Among them are “Russia” and the vocalise “At the Eternal Flame” by A. Nesterov, and folk songs arranged by L. Sivukhin, “Who Else Is in the Parlour” and “Zakhar Plowed the Vegetable Garden”.

Three choruses by F. Rubtsov based on Russian folk songs were performed here for the first time; the work is very profound and original, full of beautiful, expressive music. Seven choruses to poems by A. Tvardovsky, created by the Moscow composer, Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR A. Nikolaev, have been nominated for the 1980 State Prize.

The Gorky chamber choir first performed this distinctive cycle in the previous concert season, although its last two parts, “In Friendship There Is a Sacred Test” and “I Would Live for a Hundred Years”, which appeared earlier, the people of Gorky have sung for a long time, and in 1975, at the patriotic song competition in Ivanovo, they even won the author of these choruses a prize and the title of laureate.

The work is sustained in a spirit of civic feeling and manly lyricism, in the best musical traditions of Russian choral art.

V. BLINOVA. “Gorkovsky Rabochy”, 12.11.1980