The Award Winning Brighton & Hove Russian Choir
venue
Ralli Hall, 81 Denmark Villas, Hove BN3 3TH
schedule
Mondays 7 – 9 pm weekly with summer and winter breaks plus occasional performances.
The choir promotes Russian harmony singing and traditional Russian repertoire. We sing Russian classics and folk: lyrical and epic songs, ritual calendar music for pagan holidays, wedding songs and weeping songs. Everything is sung in Russian but we carefully translate the texts and talk about history and context of each piece. Cyrillic script, transliteration and translation are all available. The group brings together music lovers of all backgrounds and singing levels with or without any knowledge of Russian language and culture. Prize winner of the II Russian Song Competition in London 2010.
The choir was founded in January 2009 and has a busy performance schedule. We’ve sung for the Brighton Early Music Festival, Brighton Bandstand events programme, Russian Art House for Brighton Christmas Open Houses, on Brighton Jubilee Squire for Spring Forward Adult Learning Festival and at Sussex University for the Russian Society and many other events and venues. We organise our own concerts and always welcome new members.
Choir members:
… The best thing about the choir for me is the opportunity it brings to let my voice play. We are encouraged in parts of the songs to improvise and invent. That is when my soul speaks and I feel my heart grow. Polina Shepherd’s Russian choir is different. It is soulful, sublime, rousing, ethereal, liberating, and there is a good proportion of men. There is no audition, so voices are real – some booming, some tiny whispers, all textures. Everyone enjoys it – the sounds surprise us and encourage us. Cyrillic script, transliteration and translation are all available. We choose what’s best for us. I had sung before in Russian, and I studied the language to ordinary level at school, but the majority had probably not uttered much more than zdravstvweetye, spaseeba and da svidanya before they joined. This is unimportant. The quality of the pieces motivates us to perform our best, to perfect our pronunciation, to develop our registers, and to strengthen our rendition.
Within two weeks of joining I performed with the choir. In fact I took part in a duet in the performance. It was great to see the faces of the audience light up when they heard the harmonies. Since then we have done four more performances – always a great sound. There is never a hint of nerves, we are so confident.
Pam Hewitt
So what’s a good, born–and–bred Yorkshireman who doesn’t speak a word of Russian doing, singing in a Russian choir? The short answer is Enjoying it! We’re twenty–odd strong, about a third of whom are male. Only 2 or 3 are actually Russian and about the same number can speak the language, but it’s the music, folk songs and some beautiful serious songs that hold us together, well that and our musical director, Polina Shepherd. She is fantastic. Her conducting owes little or nothing to Sir Simon Rattle or Sir Colin Davies. In the more energetic songs she may pirouette, turn to the audience and even dance as she extracts the utmost verse from us and from the audience.
Sydney Levine
… There are about 25 of us – all ages, nationalities (including four real Russians!) and singing experience. This very mixed group works together and produces some wonderful music. The music we sing has been a revelation. I knew some Russian opera, church music and some popular songs. What we sing is very different: very old almost ritualistic music; more recent romances; wild dance–like song; tragic songs. And the actual process of singing seems different. It’s difficult to pin down. Something to do with the throat, or chest, or diaphragm? I don’t know. But the sound produced sounds Russian more than English.
Hazel Orchard