Continuing the theme from yesterday, today’s choice is again music steeped in the liturgy of the Russian Orthodox Church – however, it is very different to the Rachmaninoff that I previously shared as it attempts to depict “the transition from the solemnity and mystery of the evening of Passion Saturday to the unbridled pagan-religious celebrations of Easter Sunday morning”.
One of the first album covers that I shared in my recent ‘challenge’ was the Readers Digest boxed set “Music of the World’s Great Composers” and in the comments I mentioned that this set was – almost exclusively – my introduction to classical music. The various tracks became the basis of my “musical knowledge” and thus I perhaps had a few pieces of music that were sort of fundamental to my library that others may have been less familiar with.
Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture was a favourite of mine and I was able to find it on youTube to share here. It is, perhaps, not the best recording quality – but it is most certainly the one that feels most familiar (there are a large number of recordings available and I was having one that “felt” like it was right in tempo and sound).