Tchaikovsky: All-Night Vigil & Other Sacred Choral Works Latvian Radio Choir & Sigvards Klava

• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893): All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts):
• 1 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 1, Bless My Soul, O Lord 06:48
• 2 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 3, Kathisma. Blessed Is the Man 03:20
• 3 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 4, Lord, I Call to Thee 00:58
• 4 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 5, Gladsome Light 02:25
• 5 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 6, Rejoice, O Virgin 00:44
• 6 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 7, The Lord Is God 01:02
• 7 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 8, Polyeleion. Praise the Name of the Lord 04:00
• 8 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 9, Troparia. Blessed Art Thou, O Lord 04:29
• 9 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 10, From My Youth 01:42
• 10 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 11, Having Beheld the Resurrection of Christ 02:14
• 11 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 12, Common Katavasia. I Shall Open My Lips 05:17
• 12 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 15, Theotokion. Both Now and Forever 01:21
• 13 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 16, The Great Doxology 06:40
• 14 All-Night Vigil, Op. 52, TH 77 (Excerpts): No. 17, To Thee, the Victorious Leader 00:55
• Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky:
• 15 Hymn in Honour of Saints Cyril and Methodius, TH 79 02:44
• 16 Legend, Op. 54 No. 5, TH 85 03:12
• 17 Jurists’ Song, TH 80 02:02
• 18 The Angel Cried Out, TH 81 02:57
• Total Runtime 52:50

Info for Tchaikovsky: All-Night Vigil & Other Sacred Choral Works

This album presents a sequel for the award-winning album (ICMA Choral disc of the year) of Tchaikovsky’s sacred choral works by the Latvian Radio Choir and conductor Sigvards Kļava. These two albums together form the composer’s complete sacred works for the choir.

The All-Night Vigil Op. 52 for mixed choir, also known as the Vesper Service, was written between May 1881 and March 1882. It was first performed by the Chudovsky Chorus conducted by Pyotr Sakharov in Moscow at the concert hall of the All-Russian Industrial and Art Exhibition on 27 June 1882. Tchaikovsky described the work as ‘An essay in harmonisation of liturgical chants’. For this work the composer carefully studied the tradition of musical practice in the Russian Orthodox Church, which could vary considerably from one region to another. This beautiful, yet rarely recorded work is accompanied by four other choral works all written during the same decade: Hymn in Honour of Saints Cyril and Methodius as part of commemorations of the 1000th anniversary of the death of Saint Methodius, A Legend, originally coming from the collection Sixteen Songs for Children, Jurists’ Song, for the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, and The Angel Cried Out, a beautiful traditional Russian Orthodox Easter hymn and Tchaikovsky’s final choral work.

Latvian Radio Choir
Sigvards Klava, conductor

Sigvards Kļava
began working with the Latvian Radio Choir in 1987 and was appointed its Chief Conductor and Artistic Director in 1992. As one of Latvia's most prolific choral conductors, Sigvards Kļava has collaborated with every leading choir and orchestra in the country, performing the great works of the standard repertoire in addition to conducting most premieres of new choral works by Latvian composers. He has recorded over 20 CDs with the Latvian Radio Choir. Sigvards Kļava has also been Chief Conductor at a number of Latvian and Nordic song festivals. He is a co-founder of the Latvian New Music Festival ARENA and serves as a member of its artistic board. He teaches young conductors at the Choral Department of the Latvian Academy of Music and the Choral College of the Riga Lutheran Cathedral. Sigvards Kļava appears as a guest conductor with leading European choirs. He has received the Latvian Great Music Award and the Latvian Cabinet of Ministers Award.

Einojuhani Rautavaara
(born 9 October 1928) is internationally one of the best known and most frequently performed Finnish composers. He is by nature a romantic, even a mystic, as is often apparent from the titles of his works: for example Angels and Visitations for orchestra or his double-bass concerto Angel of Dusk. Despite Rautavaara's label of "mysticism" he is a complex and contradictory figure whose works cannot be categorized in stylistic terms.

At the age of seventeen Rautavaara began studying the piano and later went on to study musicology at Helsinki University and composition at the Sibelius Academy. From 1951-53 he was a pupil of Aarre Merikanto receiving his diploma in composition in 1957. In 1955 the Koussewitzky Foundation awarded Jean Sibelius a scholarship in honour of his 90th birthday to enable a young Finnish composer of his choice to study in the United States. Sibelius selected Rautavaara who spent two years studying with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and also took part in the summer courses at Tanglewood given by Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland. In 1957 Rautavaara continued his studies with Wladimir Vogel in Ascona, Switzerland and a year later with Rudolf Petzold in Cologne. Rautavaara has taught and lectured at the Sibelius Academy as the professor of composition. Since 1988 he has made his living as a composer in Helsinki.

Rautavaara's earliest works revealed close ties to tradition but also his desire to renew it. They were followed by an extreme constructivist and avant-garde phase (as in the serially organized fourth symphony "Arabescata", 1962) after which Rautavaara turned to hyper-romanticism and finally mysticism. Since the early 1980s, Rautavaara has adopted a sort of post-modern musical language in which modern and traditional elements of varying degrees of constructivism or freedom are combined with one another.

Rautavaara has composed eight symphonies, the most frequently performed of them being the Angel of Light, his seventh symphony. Symphony No. 8, The Journey was premiered in April 2000 by The Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch. Other important groups of works include concertos for different solo instruments, among them the three piano concertos, the popular Violin Concerto (1977), the Harp Concerto (2000) and the Clarinet Concerto (2001-02). Rautavaara has also written a large body of chamber music as well as choral and vocal works including All-Night Vigil for a cappella chorus. One of Rautavaara's most popular works is Cantus arcticus, concerto for birds and orchestra, in which the straightforward orchestral part is juxtaposed with the sounds of birds recorded by the composer himself. Rautavaara's latest orchestral works, published by Boosey & Hawkes, include and Manhattan Trilogy (2004), Book of Visions (2005), Before the Icons (2005) and A Tapestry of Life (2007).

Apart form his symphonies (ODE 1145-2Q) and concertos (ODE 1156-2Q), the central pillars of Rautavaara's extensive oeuvre are his operas. With Vincent (1985-87) and The House of the Sun (1990) Rautavaara has scored a notable international success. Aleksis Kivi (1995-96) was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 1997 and it has been performed in Cosenza, Italy and Minneapolis, U.S.A since then. The latest stage work is Rasputin (2001-2003), an opera about the life of mystic and healer Grigory Rasputin.

Booklet for Tchaikovsky: All-Night Vigil & Other Sacred Choral Works