Show me a people with more songs. Arizona Balalaika Orchestra & Kalinka Russian Dancers put on quite a show.
Along the string of wooden barges, the exuberant songs of the barge haulers are heard over the Volga, from its mouth down to the sea.
If repression can be heard to crumble, it is in the brittle peal and cascading play of Russian church bells. More, it is in the sinuous, subtle lines, the rooted, resonant tones and the close, colliding harmonies spun out in majesty by the church choir; in the sturdy syllables of Old Slavonic, a language kept alive by the Russian Orthodox Church.
These are sounds now rising throughout Russia on the crest of a religious resurgence since the fall of the Communist regime in 1991. They are also heard in a steady stream of recordings of Russian liturgical music making its way to the West: something new under the sun, since the faith was driven underground in the Soviet Union in the 1920's, at the dawn of the recording era.
A Russian harpooner strikes up a song. |
