Great music from war-torn lands

With the war between Russia and Ukraine likely to rivet international attention for the foreseeable future, there’s no time like the present to remind oneself that there’s a lot more to both countries than what’s dominating the news.

Or as Dame May Whitty says in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes: “You shouldn’t judge any country by its politics. We English, after all, are quite honest by nature.”

Russia and Ukraine are quite musical by nature, a fact on prominent display in Poems & Rhapsodies by the violinist Solomiya Ivakhiv, the cellist Sophie Shao, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine (Centaur) and in Rachmaninov: Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom by the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir (BIS).

Poems & Rhapsodies showcases the Ukrainian-born Ivakhiv performing a program that with its soothing properties and multinational provenance seems better poised to foster global goodwill than anything that the world’s superpowers currently have up their sleeves.

The only Ukrainians among the album’s six composers are Anatoliy Kos-Anatolsky (who, interestingly enough, served as a deputy of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union throughout the 1970s) and Myroslav Skoryk. But their compositions, “Poem for Violin & Orchestra in D Minor” (Kos-Anatolsky) and “Carpathian Rhapsody” (Skoryk) balance the French Romanticism of the pieces by Saint-Saëns (La muse et le poète) and Ernest Chausson (Poème for Violin & Orchestra) while seasoning the proceedings, especially in the case of Skoryk’s rhapsody, with a distinctly Eastern European flavor.

The centerpiece and highlight, however, is a splendid rendition of Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending. On the Russian front, the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir’s performance of Rachmaninov’s Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (BIS)—minus several refrains and responses—serves as a stirring reminder of the interdependent relationship between faith and beauty running throughout the long history of the Russian Orthodox Church.

As captured in the sonorous acoustics of the 13th-century Niguliste (St. Nicholas) Church in Tallinn, the 30 voices of the EPCC levitate, coalesce, and hover, transforming the liturgy’s Old Church Slavonic text into a kind of aurally illuminated manuscript.

The liner booklet contains English translations. But even without them, the titles of the 18 movements (e.g., “Bless the Lord, O my Soul,” “The Litany of Supplication,” “The Creed,” “The Eucharistic Prayer: A mercy of peace,” “The Lord’s Prayer: Our Father,” “Let Our Mouths Be Filled”) and the composition’s structure will keep anyone familiar with traditional Christian liturgies or attuned to reverently matched form and content from feeling adrift.