'Passion' and Resurrection

St. Mary's Cathedral was the setting for the debut of 'Passion Week.' ENLARGE
St. Mary's Cathedral was the setting for the debut of 'Passion Week.' toriavaphotography.com

Portland, Ore.

By the time the Soviet composer Maximilian Steinberg completed his "Passion Week" in 1923, he knew he'd probably never hear it. Having supplanted his conservatory classmate Igor Stravinsky as the star pupil of Russia's greatest composer, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Steinberg was already a prominent musician by the time the revolution brought the Communists to power in 1917. But since the Lithuanian-born composer, who'd converted to Orthodox Christianity from Judaism, had begun setting hymns for Orthodox Holy Week to original choral music based on Kievan, Bulgarian and Znamenny chants (an ancient Russian repertoire with its own notation that died out in the 17th century) in 1921, the regime's intensifying crackdown on artists and churches had made it impossible for such sacred music to be sung in church or in concert, or even published in its home country. The work's Latin translator wound up in the gulag; Steinberg's brother-in-law, Rimsky-Korsakov's son, was arrested; Moscow's churches and choirs were closed or severely repressed.

"Passion Week" was published in Paris around 1927—and then forgotten by all but a few scholars. Though he became director of the Leningrad Conservatory and teacher of Dmitri Shostakovich, Steinberg died in 1946 never having heard his only sacred work performed. And neither did anyone else for nearly seven more decades.

The path to Friday's long delayed world premiere at Portland's St. Mary's Cathedral and a second performance the next day in Seattle began in 2012, when Tamara Skvir, a descendant of an Orthodox composer and priest who moved to the U.S. decades earlier, showed her friend Alexander Lingas a score she'd inherited a few years earlier: Steinberg's "Passion Week." A scholar and the founder of Cappella Romana in his hometown of Portland, Mr. Lingas was fascinated by the largely unknown opus. His choir had just performed its closest predecessor, Sergei Rachmaninoff's epic "All-Night Vigil," or "Vespers."

Mr. Lingas—who had recently completed another musical exhumation, of Byzantine music that had been lost for centuries in ancient Middle Eastern desert monasteries—journeyed earlier this month to St. Petersburg, Russia, to examine the composer's original manuscript, and helped prepare a performing edition. That's how, last weekend, 87 years after its completion, a rare sacred work composed in the Soviet Union had its belated debut.

Since 1991, Mr. Lingas has guided Cappella Romana to increasing acclaim for its immaculate performances of rediscovered Byzantine chant from the era of Christianity's eastern empire; neglected 20th-century music in that tradition; contemporary sacred music; and better-known Baroque and Renaissance repertoire. One of the only professional vocal ensembles in the Pacific Northwest, the group includes superb singers (some, like Mr. Lingas, Orthodox cantors) from around the world and has recorded more than 20 CDs.

As its renown has grown, the choir has augmented its regular Portland and Seattle performances with appearances in churches, cathedrals, colleges, concert halls and museums around the country, often in conjunction with Byzantine art exhibitions or Orthodox religious services, including performances at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles's Getty Museum and Washington's Smithsonian Institution. It has even performed in its spiritual homeland of Greece. The choir recently helped Stanford University scientists re-create the celebrated ancient acoustic of the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (now Istanbul).

At St. Mary's, the opening verses of the alleluia of "Passion Week," intoned in Church Slavonic by one of Cappella's stentorian bass voices, seemed to portend another dose of the ensemble's usual hieratic Byzantine and Russian austerity. But it was immediately and surprisingly soothed by soaring high harmonies from an all-star lineup of sopranos who also sing in choir-crazed Portland's other top choruses and vocal ensembles. In fact, 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.

Steinberg mostly chose texts (and wrote appropriate music) that focused less on the dark drama that drives J.S. Bach's Passion settings and instead emphasized enlightenment and exaltation. In the troparion "When the Glorious Disciples," when Judas is "stricken and darkened with the love of money," glowering bass tones overwhelm the ethereal sopranos. Later, at "I shall arise and be glorified," the music suddenly surges from gently consoling to assertive and joyous. Though it requires highly skilled singers (particularly basses and sopranos) familiar with Orthodox idioms, it's easy to imagine parts of "Passion Week" being used in both secular and sacred choral settings.

It might even spark a rediscovery of its composer, who was later overshadowed by his contemporaries. "Part of the joy of this piece is discovering more about Steinberg himself," says Mr. Lingas, who plans a return to St. Petersburg for further study. "He wrote some very fine music, so highly valued by his contemporaries."

Meanwhile, Cappella Romana resumes a busy year that includes performances and recordings of Finnish Orthodox music; the environmental oratorio "A Time for Life" by contemporary Oregon composer Robert Kyr; and, soon, music from Serbia and Medieval Jerusalem, as well as more music from Russia. Next month, the chorus is back at the Getty Museum. And after hearing them sing last year at Germany's prominent early-music festival at Regensburg, scouts from the granddaddy of early music festivals, in Utrecht, signed the ensemble up for its first appearance there this September. Like Steinberg's "Passion Week" and the other neglected music it's resurrected, Cappella Romana continues its ascent.

Mr. Campbell writes about West Coast performing arts.

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