The Esoterics sing a Russian Christmas full of prayers, birch trees and balalaikas

Ever since 1999, Seattle a cappella choir The Esoterics has been celebrating different composers as they reach the centenary year of their birth. Some (Poulenc, Copland) are easier and more popular than others (Lennox Berkeley, Lajos Bárdos). But the composer who’s given Esoterics founding director Eric Banks the most work is the one celebrated in the choir’s December concerts in Tacoma and Seattle — Georgy Sviridov.

If you haven’t heard of Sviridov (pronounce it just like it looks), you can be forgiven. A Russian composer born Dec. 16, 1915, he lived most of his life through the Soviet era, and was one of the most successful composers of his generation, writing settings of Pushkin poetry, music for TV and film, symphonies, concerti, operas and chamber music. Yet, in secret, he composed sacred music for the Russian Orthodox church: 29 short pieces that he published in 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, as “Canticles and Prayers.”

It’s that collection that The Esoterics will sing this month, performed in its entirety for the first time in the United States. They’ll sing the one-hour work (that includes an Advent motet cycle) without applause as a meditation, balanced in the second half by a variety of his secular music.

It’s lush, gorgeous music, says Banks. But it has also meant a lot of work.

“I’d never done any music by Sviridov before — I didn’t know anything about him,” says Banks.

Not every work was published in the U.S., and Banks had to call on Russian friends for help, eventually finding the music through a Finnish bookseller. Then he had to translate the Cyrillic script into an English translation and a phonetic rendition, to help the choir sing accurately. Luckily Banks can read Russian, but the whole process required three weeks and lots of white-out to render into 172 pages of handwritten score. Then came weeks of teaching his singers — expanded from the usual 24 to 50 for this concert – to sing in Old Church Slavonic and Russian.

Banks feels good about performing the entire “Canticles,” as it’s something Sviridov never got to hear before he died in 1998. The director has arranged the pieces in chronological, Biblical order; bookended by prayers about morning and evening, and organized by keys that make sense to the ear. The music, Banks says, is a little like Rachmaninoff “with extra pitches added to that lush Russian harmony” — very accessible, and a good antidote to the more cerebral music the choir has been focusing on this season.

For the Tacoma concert, the choir may even break into four separate physical sections, making good use of the reverberant acoustics (and rather Soviet-style concrete architecture) of Christ Episcopal.

“It’s more about deep listening, attention span, meditation,” Banks says.

The second half of the concert will be totally different. Songs about carolers in the birch forest under the blue light of evening, songs about chattering magpies and Gypsies, and some fascinating songs using ostinato Russian nonsense syllables to paint pictures.

The caroling song includes some singers repeating the sound “grrrai”: the Russian way of imitating a crow or frog, both present in the forest. Another song is about a group of balalaikas — the triangular, three-stringed Russian guitar-like instrument — playing as a little girl dances on the grass.

“It’s just the nonsense syllables ‘trendi-brandi’ over and over,” explains Banks, rolling his Rs European style. Sung fast and repeatedly, the words do imitate the fast strumming of the instrument.

But while “Sviridov” has been a lot of work for Banks, he’s glad to have done it.

“It’s great, because it forces me to research and get to know a composer I may not know,” he says. “And it’s good for our audiences, too.”

This story was originally published December 8, 2015 at 7:13 AM with the headline "The Esoterics sing a Russian Christmas full of prayers, birch trees and balalaikas."