This is my entry to the Pinmapple if I had $1000 Contest ... if I had $1,000 RIGHT NOW, and if Covid-19 were over, I would be going to St. Petersburg, Russia for the weekend.
And not for what I would see, really, although I can tell from checking out posts on Pinmapple that there are plenty of beautiful things to see …
I actually studied the history of Russia in college because one of my best professors was a good fellow named Prof. Andrei Tsygankov – I enjoyed my political science class so much I went on and learned the history of his entire country from him.
So, it was lovely to finally learn about the Smolny Convent through the post in Haveyoubeenhere by @tatdt … the convent's beauty is far beyond my imaginations back in the day as I was reading in college about Empress Elizabeth.
But let me tell you what I would be doing at the convent – the beauty of what is to be seen, great as it is, would just be the bonus.
I would like to go to the cathedral Saturday night to listen to the music of Russia's Orthodox Church – specifically, the All-Night Vigil by Sergei Rachmaninov (Opus 37).
I discovered Rachmaninov's choral works about ten years ago following my love of the bass voice … Russia and the Eastern bloc in general really honors and cultivates the deepest male voices, and although great bass voices occur everywhere in the world, Russia's composers put their oktavists front and center.
Ever seen a piano? All those deep notes down at the end … the oktavists of the world can sing down into that very first octave, and there are recordings on YouTube where such singers are just singing and singing from that first C onward!
These oktavists belong to a tradition of a cappella singing more than a thousand years old … chant in the European church goes back to the time of the Byzantine church, and Rachmaninov came along later and harmonized many of the old chants. The language used in the Russian Orthodox Church is Church Slavonic, which persists much as Latin persists in the traditional church music of the Catholic Church.
Now, I am a Christian, of the dyed-in-the-wool Protestant kind. Therefore there are some things I can sing along with and some things I cannot in Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil … doctrine always matters. Still, if I had $1,000 and could get a good plane ticket to St. Petersburg and get to the Smolny Convent in the evening to hear the All-Night Vigil, I'd do it in a heartbeat … imagine starting your Saturday evening out hearing this as the sun sets … from glorious sunset to the shining darkness of twilight, in this section of ancient praise of the Lord any Christian could get into – “Gentle Light,” also put into English letters as “Svete Tihiy.”
In English the words are as follows, according to the translation available on Wikipedia for the Orthodox Church in America:
“O Gentle Light of the holy glory of the immortal, heavenly, holy, blessed Father, O Jesus Christ: Having come to the setting of the sun, having beheld the evening light, we praise the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit: God. Meet it is for Thee at all times to be hymned with reverent voices, O Son of God, Giver of life. Wherefore, the world doth glorify Thee.”
Of course, if I were to arrive on a day in which Alexander Gretchaninov's All-Night Vigil and thus his “Svete Tihiy” was being performed, I'd be just as happy. Gretchaninov is lesser-known, and his approach is completely different … I would think of coming to visit during the summer in St. Petersburg, and seeing its “white nights” in which the sun never gets far enough below the horizon for darkness to arrive … ever a lovely shining, after the sunset … .
Now that was done in an a Catholic cathedral in the United States … what I want to bring to your attention is the acoustics of those great old cathedrals … to a point a good recording picks that up … but there would be nothing like being surrounded by the sound – literally by waves of sound in Smolny Convent, in the country that has worship spaces literally BUILT for this fabulous music.
Perhaps I would arrive on a day that Victor Kalinnikov's All-Night Vigil is being performed … I would still be just as happy!
Not as bright as Gretchaninov's 'white night' in St. Petersburg close, but hey … October will have two full moons, and so I hear that “blue moonlight” brightness there, with that major-key Picardy third action at the end! Picardy thirds – major-key endings – are REALLY rare in Russian liturgical music – like a blue moon!
All-Night Vigils are long affairs (all night, right?) … even the “Gentle Light” sections are not quite at the beginning … in Rachmaninov's setting, it is the fourth section. But “Gentle Light” is the section I began with … and I can sing along in alto wholeheartedly with it, although if I left for St. Petersburg today, I would not be able to master the Church Slavonic necessary to do so properly! But I can surely hum along!
Since I get to fantasize about “if I had $1,000” in this post, can I have $1,200, just in case if Rosetta Stone or Babble has a module or two in Russian and Church Slavonic that I can master on my flight to St. Petersburg?
I really like this idea of the trip. I wish you to win the contest!
Hey @deeanndmathews thanks for entering out Pinmapple Thousand contest and sharing those beautiful performance with us. I can understand why you want to go all the way to St. Petersburg to experience a live performance.
By the way, can you please pin this post on the Pinmapple map https://pinmapple.com/ to completet the contesst entry process? Just click on the 'get code' at the top of the map and follow the instructions or check out the FAQ to get your post on it. That way we can capture all the awesome contributions from everyone and your can build your own personal travel profile on Pinmapple as well. Cheers
Done, Sir Pinmapple!
Congratulations, your post has been added to Pinmapple! 🎉🥳🍍
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