Tchaikovsky LITURGY of St John

Sunday 16 March, 8 pm

With Organist Jeremy Woodside

ChristChurch Cathedral

Tickets $25 General Admission, Limited Seating

Tchaikovsky, the great Russian composer, best known for his romantic symphonies and heartfelt melodies, composed this setting of the Russian Orthodox Liturgy in 1878. The City Choir continues its highly popular series of Sunday Cathedral Concerts and once again the massed voices will reverberate in the glorious acoustic of ChristChurch Cathedral. For Programme notes scroll down.

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Candlelight for Tchaikovsky’s Liturgy of St John
When Tchaikovsky was in flight as a composer of operas and classical works, he looked upwards to the heavens and into the eternity of his soul  and turned from the secular to the sacred, to write his Liturgy of St John for the Russian Orthodox Church in 1877.

Christchurch Cathedral will give the massed voices space to reverberate in the glorious acoustic and the listeners an ideal ambience to experience this extraordinarily beautiful music. The awesome music of Tchaikovsky’s setting of the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom will be an evocative and poignant experience. The fabric of the building looks even more beautiful in candle light, and it matches the exquisite fabric of the work, an intense masterpiece that expresses the mystical depths of the Orthodox Liturgy.

Audiences are more familiar with Tchaikovsky’s romantic symphonies, heartfelt melodies, popular ballets such as The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, and for his operas. Yet this work in a unique way uses the human voices as the orchestra with a massive core of glorious sound.

The 65 minute concert will include organ interludes by Slavic composers played by Jeremy Woodside, the Cathedral Organ Scholar.

In previous years the Choir has performed Russian-themed concerts with Rachmaninov’s Vespers (2006) and Music from Russia (2005), and these have proved very popular.

Russia’s great Romantic composer, Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was at the heights of his creative powers when he turned from the secular to write one of the most melodic and profound treasures of sacred music for the Russian Orthodox Church in his Liturgy of St John in 1877. The four-part choral work with its radiant and sonorous harmony was his first major sacred music, written in the country estate of his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck. He wrote to her: “There is nothing like entering an ancient church, standing in the semi-darkness, lost in deep contemplation searching for an answer to the wherefore, when, whither, and why."

His Liturgy of St John is his answer to these eternal questions, expressed in music, written in the traditional three part Divine Liturgy, with the Liturgy of Preparation, Liturgy of the Catechumens, and Liturgy of the Faithful or the Eucharist.

It is also of interest because the Orthodox musical tradition remained close to its roots in the Jerusalem Temple where early Christians worshipped until its destruction in AD 70. It has echoes of the very early Hebrew rituals, chants and tones that trace right back to the Holy Land.

When the Liturgy was first published, it was immediately controversial  because the first 141 copies were confiscated by police who visited all Moscow’s music shops to seize copies as it had not been approved for use in public worship by the Imperial Court Kapella, which controlled church music in Russia. They were not used to a having an important contemporary composer writing for the church; their church music was written under the repressive censorship of the Court Kapella. However, Tchaikovsky’s work had been approved by the general censor and the misunderstanding was cleared up – but everyone knew there was a new choral work written by their famous composer.