The Resurrection of "Passion Week"

by Fr. Daniel Skvir

Holy Week 2014 took on a special cultural as well as spiritual significance for Fr. Daniel and Tamara Skvir of Transfiguration Chapel in Princeton. More than a decade ago, Matushka Tamara was entrusted with a special piece of music by her uncle, conductor and musicologist Igor Buketoff, and told that the music was “the next step beyond Rachmaninoff’s Vespers.” It had been created in the early 1920’s by Maximilan Steinberg, the student and then successor of Nicholas Rimsky- Korsakoff as chair of the composition department of the St. Petersburg / Leningrad Conservatory. Of Jewish origin, Steinberg evidently embraced Orthodoxy to marry Rimsky-Korsakoff’s daughter. The piece was published quietly in Paris in the late 20’s, and then all but forgotten, with no chance of it ever being performed in the Soviet Union. In the mid 50’s, Maestro Buketoff, founder of the International Contemporary Music Exchange, was given a copy of the work by Steinberg’s student, Dmitri Shostakovich, at a meeting in Philadelphia. It rested in obscurity, unperformed and known by only a handful of scholars. Buketoff’s instructions were “treasure it, and get it performed.” (He died in 2001.)

L-R: Dmitry Kabalevsky, Igor Buketoff, and Dmitry Shostakovich

The piece is intricate, requiring a highly trained choir to tackle, so it took some time for the right circumstances to evolve. In 2012, Professor Alex Lingas, founder and conductor of Capella Romana, spent a research semester at Princeton University, faithfully attending services at the Orthodox Chapel. After one Vespers service, the Skvirs mentioned the piece and asked if Capella Romana might be interested. Professor Lingas spent a long evening studying the piece and doing some preliminary research on Steinberg, returning to Sunday Liturgy with great excitement at the prospect of bringing Steinberg’s Passion Week to light and life. After a year of additional research, including a trip to Saint Petersburg where he discovered Steinberg’s original manuscript, Lingas and Capella Romana performed the world premier of Passion Week in Portland and Seattle on April 11-12, the weekend of Palm Sunday.

The 26 voice Capella Romana (a minimum for the demands of the music according to Lingas) sang in two Roman Catholic cathedral settings, both with excellent acoustics. Attendance exceeded expectations to the point that programs became a scarce commodity in Seattle. Dr. Vladimir Morosan introduced the concert with an excellent presentation explaining the historical significance of Steinberg and the piece in relationship to the early 20th century religious renaissance in Russia, and the spiritual nature of the eleven individual hymns, all chosen from the various familiar services of Orthodox Holy Week. Throughout the pieces, various familiar strains of Kievan, Znamenny, and Bulgarian chants were briefly recognizable within Steinberg’s more modern and dramatic musical augmentations.

The music was warmly received by both audiences as well as in the local and national press. One reviewer described it as “a profound confession of faith... involving complex harmonies, beautiful dissonance which flirts lightly and then resolves, producing a vivid, energetic yet melodious sound.”

The presentation was highlighted nationally through an interview with conductor Lingas on many local NPR stations. Brett Campbell, the music critic of the Wall Street Journal, offered that “the entire Passion Week, which lasted about an hour, proved unexpectedly gentle, sometimes even lush, occasionally delicate, graced by intermittent dissonances and touches of counterpoint.” This critic mentioned that the piece deserved the attention of secular choirs as well as sacred Orthodox Church liturgical settings.

An integral part of the premiere performance of Steinberg’s Passion Week was the preparation of a new printed edition, prepared by Vladimir Morosan and Musica Russica. A compact disk of Passion Week will be recorded this summer, and should be available soon thereafter, thanks to the support of a generous benefactor.