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Stories   >   PaTRAM comes close to being an ideal vocal ensemble for Russian liturgical music / Fanfare

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PaTRAM comes close to being an ideal vocal ensemble for Russian liturgical music / Fanfare

Posted: September 2, 2021

The Male Choir of the Patriarch Tikhon Russian-American Musical Institute (PaTRAM) comes fairly close to being an ideal vocal ensemble for Russian liturgical music. Founded by Alexis and Katherine Lukianov and headquartered in Tiburon, California, the institute is named after Patriarch Tikhon, who after serving as the chief Russian Orthodox prelate in North America from 1898 to 1907, then returned to Russia. After the rise of the Communist regime, with its opposition to organized religion, Patriarch Tikhon was imprisoned in 1922 and died at the age of 60 five years later. He has since been made a saint in the Russian Orthodox Church.

The first quality that one notices in this choir is the sensitivity of the balancing and blending of voices. In many Russian male choirs one notices the richness of the basses, and the PaTRAM basses, true to form, have a rich, dark timbre. But in the overall balance they don't stick out unduly, because of the equal strength of the tenors and baritones. It is obvious that a great deal of time and effort has been put into establishing the perfect blend that the choir produce.

Also apparent is the musical sensitivity on display. The risk of any collection of Russian liturgical music is that it can easily sound unvaried. Because of a finely tuned sense of dynamic and coloristic shading, and the investment of deep feeling into their singing, PaTRAM's new disc never falls into that trap. As an example, their performance of Rachmaninoff's The Theotokos, Who is Ever-Vigilant in Prayer, which is described as a sacred concerto, exhibits an impressively wide range of dynamics. It would be impossible to quantify the number of variants of pianissimo that is demonstrated in one nine-minute work.

A number of pieces here belong to the genre of the sacred or church concerto. These are short works, generally set to Psalms or other Biblical texts and featuring brief solo passages. Sacred concertos arose in the Classical period of Russian liturgical music beginning in the 17th century. When Rachmaninoff composed his, he was recalling church services he heard as a child. Another major work, at almost nine minutes, is the sacred concerto by Stepan Anikiyevich Degtiariov (1766–1813). The choir shapes its phrases with a sense of drama and even urgency, resulting in the almost perfect balance between beauty and intensity that makes this collection stand out. The same holds true throughout its entire 71 minutes. Many of these selections are by composers completely unknown to me, but there is not one that I found uninteresting.

A unique feature of this recording is the inclusion of nine octavists in the ensemble. An octavist is a singer with an extremely low bass voice, extending below the traditional bass register. It is to PaTRAM's credit and to conductor Vladimir Gorbik that at no point is our attention distracted by this remarkable feature-the octavists become part of the ensemble and add just a touch more firm foundation to the sound.

The recorded sound is appropriately reverberant without being muddy. The program notes are extremely helpful, and full texts are given in Cyrillic, Russian transliteration, and English. In a word, this is a stunningly beautiful recording. Henry Fogel

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