MUSIC REVIEW : Cambridge Singers Offer Survey of Russian Works

Think of Russian choral music and you think of low basses. The Cambridge Singers have them--or one, at least--anchoring a big and flexible sound.

The chorus also boasts a knowledgeable and sympathetic director in Alexander Ruggieri. His “One Thousand Years of Russian Choral Music” program, heard Saturday in the first of two weekend performances at St. Anthony’s Greek Orthodox Church in Pasadena, proved an illuminating and inspiriting survey.

It did, however, span less than half the titular millennium, beginning its basically chronological progression with the Stikheron for St. Peter of Moscow by Ivan the Terrible.

The chorus women did well by the chant, and the men followed in equally fluent fashion with another imperial effort, from the 17th-Century Czar Feodor.

These pieces also provided a contextual pillar for the 19th- and early 20th-Century chant harmonizations that came after intermission.

Those were a spectacular group of choral display pieces, deeply devotional in spirit and coherent in style, yet fully characterized and inventively scored.

The composers--Nikolai Tolstiakov, Pavel Chesnokov, Alexander Kastalsky, Nikolai Golovanov and Viktor Kalinnikov--deserve further representation in this country.

It is not just exoticism that conspires against them, however. These are difficult works, with some unusual demands.

Chesnokov’s “Ne otverzhi mene” (“Do Not Reject Me in My Old Age”), for example, requires the forceful solo efforts of a basso very profundo. David Schnell projected rare presence below the staff, but even he was left growling indistinctly at times.

The ensemble challenges are also daunting, but the Cambridge Singers met them with supple, powerful singing. Ruggieri seemed to encourage a shouted edge to some of the climaxes, and they sounded tired by the end, with increasing patches of frayed intonation and blend.

The problems, however, ultimately never compromised the focused intensity of the performances.

Vocal concertos by Nikolai Kalashnikov (a Baroque polychoral Cherubic Hymn), Maxim Berezovsky (his familiar setting of “Ne otverzhi mene”) and Alexsei L’vov (a lackluster Psalm V) completed the agenda with polished flair.